Remember that chilling story about a UMass student who was visited by two homeland security agents after he tried to check out Mao’s Little Red Book? I called it a hoax right off the bat and asked “How gullible do you have to be to post on Daily Kos?”
Apparently, no less gullible than a certain drunk Senator from Massachusetts, who used the tall tale in the conclusion of his opinion article condemning the Patriot Act:
Just this past week there were public reports that a college student in Massachusetts had two government agents show up at his house because he hadgone to the library and asked for the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto. Following his professor's instructions to use original source material, this young man discovered that he, too, was on the government's watch list.Now the student admits it was all a hoax:
The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student's house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.The poor bastard probably thought he was going to be subpoenaed by a federal grand jury. To its credit, Daily Kos has posted an update admitting the story was make-believe. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a correction from Ted Kennedy.
''I made it up," the professor recalled him saying. ''I'm sorry. . . . I'm so relieved that it's over."
Extra – Sean at American Mind has more on this story.
4 comments:
What???!! I thought for sure this story was true. I mean, c'mon, which part of it was not totally plausible? After all, thanks to the Patriot Act, there are a million agents on standby just waiting to arrest and throw into Guantanamo Bay anyone who dares read an unapproved book.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go clean my chimney out so Santa can get my Xbox to me tonight.
Those professors received bad intelligence from an unreliable informant, and thus cannot be blamed.
The logic is clear. Anyone who suspects the Patriot Act is being used heavyhandedly in secret is a certified tinfoil crackpot. (I've never been interrogated by the feds, have you? Q.E.D.!)
However, when the NSA spying story was revealed-- illegally!-- a week ago, it tipped off innumerable speculative (but nonetheless real) terrorists, definitely forced them to alter their unknowable plans, and harmed our country in concrete, hypothetical ways.
That's why bunkum comes in many different flavors: everybody likes to swallow their favorite.
The story may have been fake, but it was still accurate.
"Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto"? Shouldn't a US senator know better than that?
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