I find myself wondering whether it was a good idea for our president to dignify the silly “birther” myths by publicly refuting them — and thereby acknowledging their existence.<\/p>\n
I am reminded of a time, many years ago, when a false rumor started that MacDonald’s had rats in their food. MacDonald’s was in a tough spot. If they said anything, even to say it wasn’t true, it would only increase the visibility of the rumor.<\/p>\n
So instead they ran a series of ads about how clean they were. It was very clever. They were floating a countering meme into the public consciousness, without ever having acknowledged the existence of the false rumors. If you watched carefully, you knew what was going on — but that’s not at all the same thing.<\/p>\n
What is the best course of action when one is falsely accused of something completely nonsensical? Does it ever do any good to acknowledge idiocy, even to refute it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I find myself wondering whether it was a good idea for our president to dignify the silly “birther” myths by publicly refuting them — and thereby acknowledging their existence. I am reminded of a time, many years ago, when a false rumor started that MacDonald’s had rats in their food. MacDonald’s was in a tough … Continue reading “Birthers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6335"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6336,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6335\/revisions\/6336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}