Cindy McCain looks like an abused spouse to me.

You can't imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona .

I bet the last time John McCain pushed around a shopping cart I hadn't been born yet.

Yeah, it sounded pretty real until that part. Snopes is on it, status "undetermined."

This one sets off my BS/Urban Legend detector.

It sounds really suspicious to me.

It must be true. Its on the net.

This is an account of something that happened a decade ago. None of the words attributed to McCain can be considered valid quotes. All this is is another testimony about McCain's temperament, and we've already got a nice collection of those. Throwing in one with dubious authorship and storyteller's embellishments is just going to sour the whole barrel.

You know, there was a time when I would defend conservatives against this kind of thing (yes, my B.S. detector is going off, too). But then I watch 5 minutes of Fox News or listen to 30 seconds of Sean Hannity, and I lose all sympathy whatsoever.

True or false, I hope this gets spread all over the internet. Let the other side get a taste of the bile we've had to swallow for the last 10 years. I'd like to think it would make people sit up for second and say, "hmm, maybe forwarding this email about Obama having lunch with Bin Ladin isn't the right thing to do" and not push the FORWARD button. I wish that would be the end result of this stuff coming across the internet.

Why? Because this stuff, no matter which side it's from or which side it attacks, is dangerous to our democracy. While we listen to Faux News about Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate, we miss out on the discussion about how derivatives and credit default swaps might destroy our economy, or what's going on inside Iran.

So, please, hit that forward button, send it to everyone you know, and maybe we'll get enough people sick of this kind of thing, like a kid barfing on Halloween candy. Otherwise, you'll see it all again in 2012.