Hoax Museum Blog: Politics

Miscegenation Hoax Anniversary — Philip Kadish, who's completing his Ph.D. in American Lit. at The City University of New York, notes that a 'neglected anniversary' recently passed by: the 150th anniversary of the Miscegenation Hoax of 1864, which, as he notes, was "one of the greatest and least remembered political media hoaxes in American history."

The old hoax is certainly evidence that bigotry has always been a part of American politics. As Kadish notes, the hoax foreshadowed modern political hoaxes that play to bigotry, such as the claim that Obama is a Muslim.

The race-mixing hoax that dogged Lincoln
By Philip Kadish
This year is the 150th anniversary of one of the greatest and least remembered political media hoaxes in American history, one with startling parallels to 21st century politics and the Internet age. It involved Abraham Lincoln, covert governmental programs for interracial sex, pro-slavery politicians and scheming newspaper editors.

Dave Wilson—Not Black — Dave Wilson insists he didn't get elected to the Houston Community College System Board of Trustees by "pretending to be black," though many people are now accusing him of doing exactly that. He says he merely ran a smart campaign and used "targeted marketing" to appeal to voters in the majority black neighborhood where he was running.


Yes, he avoided putting a photo of his own white face in his campaign literature, but included lots of stock photos of smiling black people. But there's nothing illegal in that.

And yes, he did prominently claim to be endorsed by Ron Wilson. People might have assumed that was the well-known black Houston politician called Ron Wilson. But if they did so, that was their own fault, because it was made clear somewhere (in the fine print at the bottom of the campaign flyer) that the Ron Wilson in question was Dave's (white) cousin in Iowa. [That brings to mind the "Subways Are For Sleeping" hoax from 1962 in which the newspaper ad for the Broadway play trumpeted the rave reviews it received from people who happened to have the same name as famous theater critics.]

Anyway, Dave Wilson is in office now, and will be for the next six years. And there's not much anyone can do to change that. [khou.com]

Azerbaijan declares election winner, before election takes place — The Washington Post reports that the Azerbaijan Central Election Commission accidentally released, via a smartphone app, the results of the country's presidential election a day before the election took place. Oops. The commission is saying that the app's developer accidentally sent out the 2008 election results as a test. But no one is believing this since a) the results show candidates from this year, not 2008; and b) it's Azerbaijan, and everyone assumes the election there is totally rigged.

This seems to deserve a place in the annals of outrageous election fraud, alongside such classics as the 1927 election in Liberia, in which Charles King was elected president with 240,000 votes cast for him, in a population with only 15,000 registered voters.

As Stalin maybe said (or maybe didn't), "It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes."

Too Much Hot Air — With the government shutting down today, I was reminded of this 1933 April 1st article in the Madison Capitol-Times about their state capitol building exploding because of a buildup of "large quantities of gas, generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the senate and assembly chambers"

I don't think any newspaper would publish a joke like this today, in the post-9/11 era, but it still seems appropriate.

Hoax Caller Imitates Sonia Gandhi — Indian papers are reporting that the attorney general of India, Goolam Vahanvati, recently received a series of calls from someone claiming to be Sonia Gandhi (President of the Congress), urging him to resign. But it wasn't actually Gandhi on the phone. It was a woman imitating her voice.

Usually it's radio stations that are behind this kind of prank. But in this case, a senior member of the Indian congress is suspected to be the mastermind behind it.

Are the Bush bathroom paintings a hoax? — A week ago, news broke that a hacker (calling himself 'Guccifer') had broken into George W. Bush's email account. The hacker sent some of the emails and photos he found there to the Smoking Gun, which promptly published them.

Three of the leaked photos showed works of art, apparently by Bush. Two of the works were self-portraits in the bathroom — Bush taking a shower and a bath. The third showed Bush working on a more traditional scene of a seaside chapel.


It's the bathroom self-portraits that attracted all the attention. Understandably, since they were so odd. Art critics from the New York Times and New York magazine (among others) reviewed them, treating them as if they were serious works of art.

But Lee Rosenbaum (aka CultureGrrl) asks an interesting question. How do we know that the bathroom paintings aren't a hoax? After all, information is only as good as its source, and the source of these paintings — the hacker Guccifer — isn't very credible. Rosenbaum notes, "If you get into bed with hackers, you may end up taking a bath."

An email from New York conservator Lenora Paglia first prompted Rosenbaum to wonder about the authenticity of the paintings. Paglia points out that it's odd the bathroom paintings are displayed on cheap wooden easels, whereas the chapel scene (the one we actually see Bush working on) stands on a top-of-the-line metal easel. Paglia's email:


Of course, if the paintings have been falsely attributed to Bush, the obvious question is why wouldn't Bush deny they were his? One possibility is that the Secret Service has advised him not to comment in any way on the leaked material, beyond admitting that his account was hacked.

The other possibility is that Bush hasn't said anything because the paintings really are his. They're so strange that I'm kind of inclined to think this must be the case. But I think Rosenbaum and Paglia are justified to be skeptical. After all, the source of the paintings is a pretty dubious one.

Did President Taft once get stuck in a bathtub? — William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States (1909-1913), was a large man. He reportedly weighed 355 pounds while in office, and according to rumor, he was so large that he once got stuck in the white house bathtub. The experience supposedly so rattled him that he ordered the installation of an extra-large tub big enough to hold four ordinary men.


The story of him getting stuck in a tub has been frequently repeated in books and newspapers, but is there any truth to the tale? Constitution Daily recently investigated the rumor, scouring through newspaper archives, documents from the National Archives, and Taft biographies, and concluded that "the entire 'stuck in a tub' story appears to be pretty leaky." There are no primary sources or first-hand witnesses who can confirm that such an incident occurred.

What is true is that Taft had some extra-large bathtubs made for him. One was installed on the U.S.S. North Carolina in 1908. A second extra-large tub was installed on the presidential yacht Mayflower in 1910. From what I gather, these tubs were extra-large partially to accomodate his size, and partially because they were built with high sides to prevent water from sloshing out while at sea.

A picture was taken of four workers sitting in the North Carolina tub. This picture may have been one source of the 'stuck in a tub' rumor. But Constitution Daily also notes that "Roosevelt's supporters made fun of Taft's weight in the bitter 1912 election. The story could have grown from there."

Mr. Corrupt Self-Serving Lying B’stard —
Add this to the satirical candidates file: The guy in the picture was born Eric Mutch. But in 2010 he changed his name by deed poll to "Zero None Of The Above" and ran in the general election for Mayor of Bristol. But he only received 172 votes. He theorized that people didn't understand the point of his name, which was "to give a choice to people who wanted to vote but did not want to give their support to any of the candidates on their ballot paper."

So he's changed his name again. It's now "Mr Corrupt Self-serving Lying B'stard." And he's running for Mayor of Bristol again.

If elected, he promises to "print a local currency and pay an annual unconditional basic annual income guarantee to every Bristol resident of £10,000 Bristol pounds."

If I lived in Bristol, I'd vote for him. Link: thisisbristol.co.uk

Hungary’s president steps down after plagiarism scandal — Did he not intend to plagiarise, or did he not intend to get caught?


(Thanks, Joe!)

Burnt Toast With Image Of Romney Shaking Hands With Satan — This auction managed to generate some attention from the internet — enough to get it pulled from eBay. Try as anyone might, no one could see the image the seller claimed was there. And the guy wanted $88.40 just for shipping. Apparently the auction was really just a thinly veiled anti-Mormon diatribe. Link: gawker.com.

The 1% Tip Hoax — Last week an image showing the "tip" left by a rich banker who had dined at a Newport Beach restaurant spread around the internet. The financial tip was slightly less than 1%, on a bill of over $100, but the patron also left a life-advice tip: "GET A REAL JOB".


Naturally, the image provoked the customary rage reaction from netizens.

The image originally was posted on a blog called "Future Ex-Banker" run by an anonymous blogger who said he worked in the corporate office of a bank for a boss who represented "everything wrong with the financial industry." He further claimed of this boss:


The image has now proven to be a hoax. The owner of the restaurant, True Food Kitchen, searched through their receipts and found the original copy, which included neither the stingy tip nor the insulting piece of advice. The "Future Ex-Banker" blog (futureexbanker.wordpress.com) has been taken down.


I gotta say, the original image was a pretty good photoshop job. I'm guessing that the hoaxer scanned the original receipt, digitally erased some of the information, then printed out a new copy, wrote the new "tip" on it, and took a picture of it. That would be easier than doing the alteration entirely digitally.

I'm also curious whether the hoaxer was a liberal or a conservative. Given that the hoaxer had to know that the hoax would eventually be exposed, it makes me think this might have been black propaganda by a conservative, trying to make it look like a liberal/progressive hoax.

Links: Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun.

Mitt Romney and False Memory Syndrome — Mitt Romney recently displayed an example of what I termed "false memory syndrome" in Hippo Eats Dwarf. It's the tendency of politicians to have memories of events that never happened to them.

In Romney's case, he recently told an audience how he remembered being at Detroit's Automotive Golden Jubilee, in which his dad served as grandmaster. The problem is, the Golden Jubilee took place on June 1, 1946, nine months before Mitt was born. (link: thestar.com)

Other examples of the phenomenon include French president Nicolas Sarkozy claiming he was present in Berlin in November 1989 and helped knock down the Berlin Wall; Ronald Reagan claiming he witnessed the liberation of the Nazi death camps during World War II -- even though he was never sent to Europe during the war. And Arnold Schwarzenegger saying he was inspired to enter politics after watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential debate on TV in 1968, even though the debate wasn't televised.
(Thanks, Joe!)

Mitt Romney gets a shoeshine — In recent days, a photo of Mitt Romney that appears to show him getting a shoe shine as his private jet waits has been spreading around the internet. It's been popular with anyone who doesn't much like Romney because it seems to capture the swanky lifestyle he enjoys as a 0.001 percenter.


But, in reality, this photo is a case of 'real picture, false caption'. The picture dates to 2008 and actually shows Romney sitting for a security check before boarding a plane in Denver, Colorado. The guy in the red jacket is waving a security wand over Romney's shoe. Not giving him a shoe shine.

Of course, the scene still depicts the lifestyle of the one-percent, because most of us don't get personalized security checks on the tarmac in front of our plane. Instead, we have to remove our shoes and wait like cattle in long security lines. Link: NPR.org

The Navalny Affair — Supporters of Vladimir Putin have been caught in a flat-footed attempt at character assassination. Wanting to smear blogger Alexei Navalny, who's been a fierce critic of Putin's government, they created a picture showing Navalny meeting with the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The implication was that Berezovsky was funding Navalny. Then Putin's supporters published the picture in one of the party newspapers.

But the picture was a clumsy fake. The original, undoctored version of the photo soon emerged, as well as numerous parody versions. Links: BBC, Daily Mail.


Some newspapers are commenting that the stunt recalls how Soviet authorities routinely used to doctor photos for political purposes. Which is true -- see "The Commissar Vanishes." But the stunt reminds me most of an American hoax from 1950 -- The Tydings Affair -- in which a fake photo showing Senator Millard Tydings chatting with the head of the American Communist Party was circulated by Joseph McCarthy, causing Tydings to lose an election. The Tydings and Navalny photos are similar both in their general composition and in their strategies of guilt-by-association.

Dobrica Cosic Doesn’t Win the Nobel Prize — Serbian media reported Thursday that one of their own countrymen, writer Dobrica Cosic, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he hadn't. Soon after, the Swedish Academy announced the real winner: Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

The Serbian media reported Cosic as the winner because they had all received an email, seeming to come from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, announcing Cosic as the winner. The email linked to a website, nobelprizeliterature.org, that seemed to confirm Cosic as the winner. However, both the email and the site were fakes. (link)

Apparently Cosic is a strong Serbian nationalist. The Economist describes him as, "the intellectual godfather of the Serbian nationalism which played such a decisive role, not just in the destruction of Yugoslavia but in the military drive to create a greater Serbia from its ashes." According to the Montreal Gazette, Cosic writes, "lengthy tomes about the suffering of the Serbs through the ages." The hoax was perpetrated by some people who don't like him. Its basic purpose was to annoy him. The group, describing themselves as a "non-profit, self-organized group of web activists," have now posted this explanation on the site:

$16 Muffins — The legend of Out-Of-Control Government Expenditures is alive and well. Back in the 1980s, reports of the US government paying $400 for a hammer and $600 for a toilet sparked outrage. And now, late last month, came the news that the Justice Department had paid $16 a piece for muffins at a 2009 conference. But just as the hammer and toilet weren't really as expensive as they seemed, it turns out that the price of the muffins was an artifact of accounting. The $16 included the entire continental breakfast, service, and taxes. Of course, while the government may not be paying premium price for muffins, those bailouts to the bankers did seem a little steep.

Disappearing Political Cleavage — Usually when politicians become the victims of photo retouchers it's because they've become undesirable to someone in power, and so they're summarily removed from the photo. It's far less common for their images to be retouched in order to desexualize them. This is usually the fate of actresses and models. But this is what happened recently to Rathika Sitsabaiesan, a young Canadian MP. Her cleavage was erased from the image of her that appears on the House of Commons website. The National Post reports:


Sitsabaiesan has not commented on the disappearance of her cleavage. It's quite possible she was the one who ordered its removal.

Obama vs. Perry: “Boys Will Be Boys” — Status: Real Photos, False Captions



The political dirty tricks season is upon us again, and so we get the image above, which has recently been circulating around conservative blogs. (Thanks to Gayl for forwarding it to me.) Its intent is obvious: to show that Rick Perry was serious and heroic as a young man, whereas Barack Obama was a bit of a punk.

The pictures themselves are real. The picture of Obama was taken in 1980 by Lisa Jack when both were freshmen at Occidental College in L.A. The picture of Rick Perry is undated, but must have been taken sometime between 1972 and 1977, when Perry served in the Air Force.

Therefore, the captions of the images are incorrect. Obama would have been 19 at the time the photo was taken, whereas Perry would have been between the ages of 22 and 27. So the comparison isn't quite fair. By the time he was in his early 20s, Obama was working as a community organizer in Chicago.

Furthermore, Perry himself was reportedly a bit of a punk while in college. According to a recent article in The Texas Tribune:


A fairer comparison might have been to contrast Obama looking laidback in his straw hat and cigarette dangling out of his mouth with Perry exploding a toilet.

The Yes Men Strike Again — Through a series of fake press releases and websites, the Yes Men briefly made it appear as if Canada had pledged to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 40%. From the Globe and Mail:


More details at gawker.com. (Thanks, Joe!)