Chris Hayes' fabulous piece on email smear campaigns gave a lot of attention to how the "Barack Obama is a secret Muslim schooled in a madrassa" meme got started, but it appears the same theme is metastasizing into more right-wing smears. What might be the latest tripe being fed into the machine came up in a reader question during the Post's Politics Hour yesterday: "There is a photo going around showing Obama during the Pledge of Allegiance with his hands cuffed closed and not on his heart. I also heard that he said he would not raise his hand and put it on the Bible if he was elected president -- he wanted the Koran there. If it is true, voters need to know, and if not, what is his side of the story?" The Post aptly pointed him to their own Fact Checker column on the first smear, and writes off the second as "nonsense." But it appears the swearing-in on the Koran story has been around for a while, too, turning up in the comment sections on Hotline, Yahoo, and Huffington Post, just to name a few, over the past year. Whether this smear is the product of an email campaign, confusion with Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, or simple ignorance, one may never know.
--Kate Sheppard
