It's a Duck

Isn't that interesting? Out of the blue, an Army NCO just happens to email a mat company in Wisconsin to find out if they ship to APO addresses. The company, which happens to be fairly new, happens to be owned by Muslims. Someone working at the company happens to send an anti-Iraq-war-message in reply. The NCO just happens to let his family in the US know about this. Fox and the right-wing blogosphere are all over it. The story just happens to reach the boiling point on the day of Bush's pathetic State of the Union speech. We reach the two-source threshold in nanoseconds, which leads Snopes.com to anoint the whole thing as true.

The company, claiming to be inundated by hostile email (this I can believe) has taken down its Web site, which (coincidentally I am sure) will never reappear.

I can think offhand of about half a dozen ways to set up a gullible local news media, Fox, and a gullible blog segment ready to accept the item without question. Having done that, it becomes child's play to schnocker Snopes and get the real seal of approval. Likewise, I can come up with a good number of tough questions that nobody bothered to ask.

The story seems to languish in the halls of the right, so perhaps it did not achieve all it was meant to. I will retreat with my skepticism to an armchair, watch the media world go mad, and wait for someone to confess what I believe to be a fraud.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...