Olson urban legend update #2: Hamline responds

Yesterday, we posted about the most recent iteration of a false urban legend in Urban legend update: the 2008 election, republican decay and Hamline's Joe Olson. (Disclosure: we graduated from Hamline undergrad many years ago; we don't know Olson).

A minutes ago, Hamline's p.r. department sent us an email:

Good morning,

This urban legend/internet myth has been floating around for nine years, originally as a supposed 'analysis' of the Bush/Gore election in 2000.  Here's the info on urban legend debugging site, Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp

Apparently, yes, it looks like someone wanted to rehash this old, bogus internet hoax and alter it to now state that this fake analysis was on the 2008 election.

Professor Olson of Hamline University did not author anything in this. He even has a statement on his own website at Hamline about this. He's been trying for years to put an end to this internet harassment.

If you do run anything on this, please forward on the truth to your readers.[Ollie's note: we did, and linked to the Snopes post.] A few days ago, Rush Limbaugh ran this fake email and analysis on his show, and when we emailed his producers to request a correction, they did:

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_121008/content/01125113.guest.html

Thanks for anything you can do to help dispel the hoax.

Hamline University Public Relations

The email fills in one of the key links in the distribution of the updated version of the false urban legend. We appreciate the link to Limbaugh's correction, and hope that the harassment of Olson stops. It must be truly bothersome to be linked to this malarky for years on end.

Comments

[Phoenix Woman]

Thanks for getting to the bottom of this, Ollie.