AH HA

It turns out, as my old friends just emailed me, that "In God We Trust" is on the new dollar coins, just smaller and in a different spot.

So this whole right wing campaign, touting another new example of how our government is trying to "remove God from the public life of our nation" is bogus! (I don't have any of the coins so wasn't able to verify either of these things.)

And yet there will be plenty of people who got the original e mail—which was pretty sophisticated in terms of graphics and size and momentum and how widely it has spread—who will continue to believe the original lie and go to the polls this Fall believing it. That's how "the big lie" technique works. Usually it appears in front page stories, or on Fox News or other right wing venues, and then is picked up by the mass media in general even if just to comment on it's happening, and whether sides are taken or not it snowballs into becoming general "knowledge" even though it isn't true.

Like Obama's not being patriotic because he supposedly doesn't wear a flag lapel pin. When the truth is he sometimes wears one and sometimes doesn't. exactly what McCain does. But McCain gets away with it, and Obama doesn't, because the Democrats and their supporters don't make an issue out of it, because they know it isn't an issue. The powers that be on the right know this too, but they also know a lot of people will believe it's an issue if they use the big lie on it.

Like I've said before, Lee Atwater, who perfected this kind of big lie campaign for the right wing of the Republican Party, before it totally took over the party, admitted his responsibility for introducing a lot of these tactics into Republican campaigns and on his death bed expressed his regret and sorrow over what he had done and pleaded that future generations not follow his path but instead take the high road and make campaigns about real issues and the truth.

Obama and McCain have both promised to do that, but I suspect the same rightwing groups that backed things like the swift boat ads will be at it again as soon as the general campaign starts in earnest.