Never before have I been so pissed about my website being down. Yesterday, when I made my usual rounds of the Net’s preeminent hate sites, I came across a huge (HUGE) headline on the Drudge Report. Apparently a McCain volunteer had been viciously “mutilated.” She was a 20 year-old white girl, brutally attacked by a huge, dark skinned (of course) black man. He mugged her, and when he saw her McCain bumper sticker he flew into a rage, held her down, punched her, kicked her over and over again, and then carved a “B” (for “Barack”) into her face, to “teach her a lesson.”
I’d heard this story before. We all have. Countless times. Only sometimes it’s a young white mother whose kids were stolen by a large black man (only later come to find out she was a little bit off in the details: her kids were actually sitting at the bottom of a lake where she’d put them days earlier).
I try to suspend my cynicism when I hear about things like this, because these sorts of attacks do occasionally happen. Thugs and monsters come in all colors, creeds, and shoe sizes. But then I got to the part of the article where it said she hadn’t gone to the hospital. And the part where her friend drove her around for a while until they found the place where the attack supposedly occurred. And the part where her photograph showed the “B” carved BACKWARD in her cheek, as if whoever had done it had been looking in a mirror.
But my website was down, so I couldn’t point out any of this. So I went to sleep, feeling 100% sure the hoax would be uncovered by morning. And sure enough it was. She made it up. This 20 year-old College Republican member from Texas, Ashley Todd, made the whole thing up. Reality wasn’t helping out in the whole “Obama and his supporters are scary, dangerous traitors” routine, so she had to do something. And who can blame her? She was raised in an era where her favorite party made a practice of fabricating their own facts when the real ones weren’t advantageous for them.
But at least she could’ve carved the “B” foreward. I hope that “B” she’s going to be carrying around for the rest of her life is a scarlet letter that’ll remind her, from now on, not to be such a moron.
On the bright side, when she’s out of jail, she’s got quite a career ahead of her in the Republican Party.
