The Sick Propaganda of the Racist Right (Rescuing Peggy Joseph)

This morning Drudge Report broke the headline as follows: IN OBAMA WE TRUST: 'He Is Going To Pay For My Gas And Mortgage'..., with a link leading to the video below. Never mind that, proving my previous point regarding Drudge's absolute irrelevance, I had already seen this video days ago on Newsvine -- it was old news. What really bothers me here is that the quotation, "He is going to pay for my gas and mortgage," is utterly fictitious and deliberately misrepresents and distorts the woman's words in the video.



The woman's name is Peggy Joseph. In the video, she's being interviewed right after an Obama rally, and she's clearly in an emotional state. What is also clear is that she does not believe Obama is going to pay for her gas or her mortgage. "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car," she says. "I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he's going to help me."

As an educated white man who worries about putting gas in his car and worries about paying his mortgage, I know exactly what Ms. Joseph means. She means that, if we fight for Obama, Obama will fight for the middle class. She means that if Obama wins, we might actually have a president who prioritizes the middle class over the richest 1%. She means that under Obama's economic policies, she believes the middle class will get a fair shake. She believes she'll make a fair wage, so she can afford to pay for gas and make her mortgage.

Do a quick Google search of Peggy Joseph's name, however, and you'll get a long list of right-wing blogs announcing Peggy as Obama's "Joe the Plumber." She proves that Obama is a communist, they argue, that his followers believe we'll just pull up to the station and bill our gas on the government's tab, that we can stop payment on our mortgage checks now cause Papa Obama's gonna bail us all out, anyway. This interpretation of Peggy's words is utterly ludicrous and blatantly racist. One need only read the comments on the YouTube video to see the latter as true: Peggy is called an idiot, an animal, and a nigger.

Personally, I think Peggy should sue Drudge for libel. More than this, I wish the liberal bloggers would pick up this story and defend poor Peggy against a clearly trumped-up and twisted charge. Most of all, however, I believe the media outlet that interviewed Peggy has a moral obligation to do a follow up with her to allow her to clarify her statement. The woman is a YouTube sensation and has been viciously maligned by the likes of Matt Drudge. It is the least the station owes her.

Unfortunately, this is what we can all look forward to during the next four years. We've likely just elected the first African-American President of the United States. The party line for the racist right is this: the blacks are out to get us.