Jumping in Pools at Politifact

We've all gotten a kick out of the Obama Military Oath story, and so it's been written about by Bill Adair, who interviewed yours truly. And now it's on PolitiFact!

Our tale begins on Jan. 28, when Matthew Avitabile, a 22-year-old grad student in upstate New York, decided to write a tongue-in-cheek blog item that said President Obama wanted soldiers to stop taking an oath to the Constitution and instead pledge their loyalty to the president himself.
Under the fake name Michele Chang -- a name he dreamed up because he had just been talking to someone named Michele -- Avitabile wrote a bogus news story that quoted a statement from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs saying, "The President feels that the military has been too indoctrinated by the old harbingers of hate: nationalism, racism, and classism. By removing an oath to the American society, the soldiers are less likely to commit atrocities like those at Abu Ghraib."
Avitabile labeled it satire in a note beneath the story, but in the superheated world of political blogs, where passions often run faster than reason, that wasn't enough.
....
Avitabile, a Republican who had previously poked fun at Obama with a tongue-in-cheek article that said scientists had determined that he was "genetically superior," is thankful for all the traffic it generated for his blog Jumping in Pools. In the past he was lucky to get 1,000 hits on a story, but this one got more than 50,000. Yet he's disappointed that so many people published his work without verifying it.
"Out of the 50,000 who looked at it, only three had the good sense to contact me and see if it was true," he told us (PolitiFact was one of the three).Avitabile described himself as a moderate Republican -- "I'm pro-gay rights, pro-wind energy" -- but said he was surprised that so many in his party had such negative feelings about Obama.
"People wanted to believe this about the president so bad, that he would really go toward a dictatorship so much that they would go with it without checking it," he said.


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