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Have You Looked At Obama’s “Not Exactlys?”


Not exactly.

Actually, we’ve looked at it rather a lot. We just haven’t written about it. Until now.

You surely know the e-mail we’re talking about. It’s one of the more popular chain e-mails that our readers keep sending our way. You know, the one that starts out with

  1. Selma Got Me Born — NOT EXACTLY…

That’s actually the nice version. Some trade “LIAR” for “NOT EXACTLY.” Pretty much all the versions go on to list a whole bunch of other supposedly false Obama claims. The trouble is, most of the e-mail is either misleading, wrong or just flat-out made up.

We’re not going to go through and do a line-by-line debunking of this thing. It’s really long (over 50 claims at last count) and, well, you might have noticed that there’s an election going on. Keeping up with speeches and ads is keeping us pretty busy. Fortunately, the good people at Snopes.com have done a bang-up job debunking this e-mail.

We here at The Wire are big fans of Snopes.com. It’s a great place for checking out all those e-mails that Crazy Uncle Harry insists on sending you. And, as long as you’re clicking on links, you should also go read our report on why you probably shouldn’t believe any chain e-mail.