You took the long winding road and in end did not evidence anything to disprove what I said about the woman being believed. McCain and Palin personally called this woman. The majority of the news stations that reported this story barely used the word alleged and reported it as fact. The police may have questioned her but society was very quick to believe that a black man attacked her.

I disagree with your claim that the article inaccurately describes significant “initial belief” in Todd’s story. You make a distinction between mature, thinking conservatives and other presumably immature, less thoughtful people. You then say that since anyone in the former group had immediate suspicions about Todd’s claims, Renee’s claim about “initial belief” is unwarranted.

However, I think this claim is warranted, because the more significant group here–and it’s quite likely a very large group–consists of people who DID initially find her claims credible. These are the people who, thanks to Todd’s actions, will still spread this story as if it really is true (“She just bowed to pressure from the liberal media, or the Obamatrons,” and so on), and feel more justified by it to believe similar claims of vengeful black violence. She’ll still be a martyr for a lot of people out there, some of whom may well feel further justified in taking their own revenge. Just because her story’s been debunked doesn’t mean it won’t still add fuel to the fires of racist suspicion, resentment, and hate.

So while your claim that mature, thinking people did not initially believe her story is probably more or less accurate, it overlooks the more significant, and I would guess larger groups of people who did initially belief it. Including those who will not let it die.

by matttbastard

Michelle Malkin responds to the news that PA McCain volunteer (and College Republican) Ashley Todd, who claimed on Thursday to have been attacked by a big scary black Obama supporter, made the whole damn thing up (ZOMGWTFBBQ NO WAIS!):…

“tolerating” should read “tolerate.”

Your point about Ashley Todd’s supposed initial credibility is both mistaken and misplaced, for reasons described later in this comment.

Moreover, the real problem is not that some whites might initially have believed her, but that, as you actually do point out, McCain/Palin’s racist dogwhistling, together with the televised response of his rally attendees, probably did convince Ashley that her racist lie would gain her the empathy that I’ll bet she craved. She might also have thought it would drum up votes for McCain.

In other words, the problem is not that she actually initially succeeded in fooling most whites (because she probably didn’t), but that, because of McCain/Palin’s racist rhetoric, Ashley BELIEVED that a racist lie would be useful to her. That’s the problem: Not that, in 2008, whites might reflexively credit a story like Ashley’s (because they probably didn’t), but that someone like Ashley still believes that even an obviously trumped-up story like hers will trigger enough IRRATIONAL white paranoia to enable her to get what she wants. In other words, Ashley was imitating the McCain/Palin strategy, which is not aimed at intellectually convincing whites that racist lies are plausible, but at poking at white irrationality through the bars of its cage, as it were, until the desired results are achieved. It’s Hitler’s strategy as applied in 2008, first by McCain/Palin and then by Ashley Todd.

But now, regarding Ashley’s supposed initial credibility:

On the contrary, Ashley Todd was NOT “successful in initially being believed,” at least not by mature people of any race.

Most importantly, police disbelieved her as soon as videotape evidence showed that she was lying, according to Joe Mandak’s Yahoo! AP report dated 10/24/2008 at 3:04 p.m.

Thus the police actually expected her to recant and called her back in in order to induce her to confess to lying, according to the same article. So the language of your second paragraph (“only to have her admit … [etc.]“) is, I think, misleading in that it leaves the impression that police did believe her until she ‘unexpectedly’ confessed. But, as the AP article shows, they didn’t believe her and did in fact expect her to recant.

Not only the police, but, as you actually did acknowledge, even Neil Boortz, the right-wing radio demagogue, publicly disbelieved her from the start. Boortz was deluged by hate mail for disbelieving her. But the fact that he felt comfortable declaring his disbelief on air is evidence that mature adults of any race could not accept Ashley Todd’s story at face value because her story is too obviously timed and constructed for McCain’s benefit, to be given any prima facie credit.

That’s why I myself, a Caucasian and Republican, published through comment on Natalia Antonova’s blog my own disbelief in Ashley Todd’s story as soon as I read about it on the same blog, because Ashley’s story is obviously bogus for the reasons mentioned above.

I go through these points so laboriously to show that, if the police and two white conservatives (Boortz and myself), can disbelieve Ashley Todd from the start, then presumably so did quite a few other whites who also think of themselves as conservative.

Certain Caucasian audience segments might have eagerly credited Ashley Todd’s story, for the reasons you describe. But it’s likely that most thinking white conservatives disbelieved her from the start because her story is too obviously a lie.

Therefore, in my opinion, you should have dropped your point about Ashley’s supposed initial credibility, because she probably didn’t have much initial credibility.

The real problem, as I pointed out near the very beginning of this comment, is that Ashley was probably inspired by McCain/Palin’s racist rhetoric to employ the GOP strategy of triggering irrational fears (among whites) in order to get what she wanted.

Ashley was employing the GOP strategy of The Big Lie, which is aimed at exploiting irrational anxiety rather than at convincing audiences that a lie is intellectually plausible. This strategy is also meant to desensitize targeted audience segments to the use of obvious deceit in political speech, by exploiting their desire to act out their most irrational hatreds and anxieties. The goal is reached when the targeted audiences believe that obvious deceit in political speech is not only harmless but actually preferable as long as it provides a cover for acting out irrational anxiety and hatred. In other words, the goal is to induce targeted audiences to prefer known lies to known truths by convincing such audiences that they will achieve safety by repeating the known lies and by suppressing the known truths (which is called “Share The Lie”).

Commercial advertising employs roughly the same strategy. That’s why GOP political speech these days sounds like poorly-written ad copy.

I apologize for this overlong comment. I also note that your other points in your column are beyond dispute. But I wanted to point out that Ashley Todd did not really succeed in being “initially believed,” except by audience segments who were Sharing The Lie (as I think). Ashley suspected that she hadn’t convinced the right people and that’s why she ’spontaneously’ confessed in very short order. Apparently she realized that Sharing The Lie works only with people who can tolerating lying.

Cause if you were getting raped by William Ayers and hordes of homosexual black militants, they’d at least carve the B in properly.
See Also: And This Is Even Dumber, Update: “She hasn’t really shown any obvious remorse”, The Assisted Suic…