WASHINGTON -- Some conservatives, apparently, are willing to believe anything about Sonia Sotomayor. And by anything, I mean anything.
The director of CPAC, the annual right-wing Woodstock, posted some alleged quotes from the Supreme Court nominee on the CPAC Twitter feed earlier this afternoon. "Soto: The time has come to end white male oppression by castrating every white male until they are no longer dominant in Western culture," the first post read. "(cont) That means forcible removal of their testicles. I realize the brutality of my comment, and I don’t know how to say it more clearly." A couple minutes later, this question came: "So, is the quote below accurate? I haven't seen it anywhere."
Surprisingly enough, the reason the quote hasn't been anywhere is because it's completely made up. About 10 seconds of Googling turned up a satirical news story that the "quotes" came from, on Carbolic Smoke Ball, which clearly describes itself as providing "news unencumbered by the facts" and as being "proud publishers of fake news since 2006."
About two minutes after the first quote showed up, the posts were deleted (but my desktop Twitter software kept them in its memory). "Ignore last couple of tweets," the director, Lisa De Pasquale, wrote. "I was fooled!" In an e-mail to Salon, De Pasquale said she republished the "quotes" before checking into them "because I thought it was funny."
Someone had, it turned out, sent her the quotes, but not the source. Of course, the way Sotomayor's confirmation hearings are going, it wouldn't be entirely surprising if some enterprising Republican senator asked her, before the week was out, for her judicial philosophy on the matter of castration.
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