Back of the Envelope

I haven't been talking about politics too much recently, but this is too rich not to comment on. There is an e-mail going around that says:

Mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005. There is pending legislation in the House and Senate, S89 and HR 163,to reinstate mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005. This plan includes women in the draft, eliminates higher education as a shelter, and makes it difficult to cross into Canada.

The Bush administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention is on the elections. The Bush administration plans to begin mandatory draft in the spring of 2005, just after the 2004 presidential election.

· The Congress has added $28 million to the 2004 selective service system budget to prepare for this military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

· Bush has ordered the Selective Service to report to him by March 31, 2005 on their readiness to implement the draft by June 2005

· The pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide.

Please act on this:

· Tell everyone you know - parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, godparents, friends, teachers

· Call and write to your U.S. Senator and your U.S. Representatives and ask them why they aren't telling their constituents about these bills.

(Hat tip to Michelle Malkin, who got it from Betsy's Page)

I don't have a lot of respect for leftists in general these days, but this level of deception strikes me as well, sickening. Of course, it's just spam, about as believable as those ads for herbal viagara you get everyday, right? Yes and no. It's about as honest as those ads. There is such a bill, being proposed by Democrats in order to drum up opposition to the war. It is opposed by pretty much all Congressional Republicans, most Congressional Democrats, the Bush Administration, and the Pentagon. The Selective Service preparations are in response to a law passed in 1993, by a Democratic Congress under a Democratic President, a law whose purpose is to ensure that the government procedures for these things work properly, not to actually implement it. (See Betsy's page for details.) So aside from the germ of truth, and the correct spelling, I'd toss this e-mail aside with the rest of the spam and advise the college students who received it to do the same. Except that anonymous and duplicitous e-mailers aren't the only ones spreading draft rumors. John Kerry and Max Cleland have been playing it up as well.

I think this marks new territory for political deception. Propose a ludicrous law which cannot possibly pass. Wait a couple of months so that everyone forgets who proposed it, and then claim that it's what the opposition intends to do and use your bill as evidence. (For the record, the Democratic leadership is not actually using the bill as evidence, and there's no indication that they are behind this lying e-mail, but Democrats did propose this law specifically to increase opposition to the war by using the threat of a draft, and they are the ones talking about the draft.) Here is one area where the Internet is weaker than the mainstream media. No matter how hard it tried, the mainstream media would have a hard time pushing an idea like this. A blog could do it, but he'd have to have no comments and confidence that his readers could not traffic blogs which would fact-check him. E-mail, however, is perfect. The originator cannot be held accountable, and there's just enough truth in this to make it sound believable. Fortunately, Snopes is on the case. Unfortunately, the Snopes article says the draft is improbable while failing to note the most important lie in the e-mail--when it lays responsibility for these things on President Bush, when in fact the bill was proposed by the Democrats as a scare tactic.

New Post: Someone is covering this pretty well. See above.