WASHINGTON -- "A lie can travel halfway around the world," Mark Twain is said to have exclaimed, "while the truth is putting on its shoes." What an optimist he was. In this age of the Internet, lies go around the globe many times before the truth can even find its shoes.
Just ask Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Just as Illinois' rising superstar senator announced his White House bid, an anti-Obama smear campaign was percolating in cyberspace and popping up in countless e-mail boxes, including mine.
And by the time Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York announced her presidential bid Saturday, the Obama rumor had taken on new legs in the mainstream media, thanks to an unfounded accusation linking the rumor to "the Hillary Clinton camp."
The Web site of the conservative magazine Insight alleged that Democrats "connected" to the New York senator had discovered that Mr. Obama had studied at a madrassa, a Muslim religious school, for four years while living in Indonesia as a kid and didn't want anyone to know about it.
Besides its incendiary implications of anti-Muslim paranoia, the allegation of an Obama cover-up and the Clinton outing is simply wrong, wrong and wrong.
First, Mr. Obama was not secretly educated in a radical Islamic school when he was growing up in Indonesia. That was confirmed this week by CNN senior international correspondent John Vause, reporting from Jakarta. Mr. Vause found that the Besuki School is not and never was a madrassa. It is a secular public school attended mostly by Muslims.
That's not surprising, since Indonesia is the world's largest majority-Muslim country. Yet about a fourth of the school's enrollment was and is non-Muslim, like Mr. Obama.
Insight also said Mr. Obama's political rivals "are seeking to prove" that the school promoted Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam that fuels many Islamic terrorists. But Mr. Vause observed on CNN that "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan. ... This school is nothing like that."
Yet, no matter how many facts you dig up, truth has a tough time standing up to a juicy rumor. By the time CNN had debunked the unfounded allegations, they had been repeated by Fox News, The New York Post, CNN Headline News and other outlets. To hear some of the chatter, you would have thought that Mrs. Clinton's campaign had all but outed Mr. Obama as an al-Qaida agent.
