Have you ever played the game of Chinese Whispers, also known as the telephone game? It’s a game played religiously by the RW media and molds the minds of pliable GOP voters.

Would I lie to you?
I ran across a tweet by Bristol Palin condemning Hillary Clinton for using her 6 year old daughter to push the abortion agenda.

What kind of Mother would use her 6-year-old daughter to advocate for abortion? Hillary Clinton https://t.co/O6CpLECw9r

— Bristol Palin (@BristolsBlog) February 18, 2016

At first I was a bit confused, because I assumed Palin, being the wannabe clone of her mother she is, simply misunderstood the report she read. Then after doing the research Palin should have before going off half cocked, I went from confused to frustrated to outright angry.

Let me show you why.

We all know that the rabid RW media loves to push their agenda and will purposefully twist information to fit the narrative they want to convey. As I’ve said several times here and elsewhere, appearances are more important to them than any substance. I believe this is because they know their audience well and which tactics to use to manipulate that audience’s minds, and more importantly their votes.

Mind you I may be giving them far too much credit. It seems much of their information is the result of a game of Chinese Whispers. If you’re not familiar with the term, I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

Chinese whispers (or telephone in the United States[1]) is a game played around the world,[2] in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly, and often amusingly, from the one uttered by the first.

As in most explanations, the best place to start is at the beginning, so we’ll let Chelsea explain her point to us in her own words.

“My mother is very deeply a person of faith,” Chelsea said. “It is deeply authentic and real for my mother, and it guides so much of her moral compass, but also her life’s work.”

“I find it quite insulting sometimes when people say to my mom, my dad or me . . . that they question our faith. I was raised in a Methodist church and I left the Baptist church before my dad did, because I didn’t know why they were talking to me about abortion when I was 6 in Sunday school — that’s a true story.”

“I recognized that there were many expressions of faith that I don’t agree with and feel quite antithetical to how I read the Bible, but I find it really challenging when people who are self-professed liberals kind of look askance at my family’s history.”

I’ll just point out that Chelsea was born in 1980. The reason I point that out will become clear in a moment.

The first link in the chain that ended up around Bristol Palin’s head I found at an online magazine called Page Six where a gentleman by the name of Richard Johnson wrote a column on Feb 9, 2016 titled “Chelsea Clinton is tired of people questioning her family’s faith” At this point the title of the article is accurate. Unfortunately that doesn’t last.

He starts his article like this:

Chelsea Clinton is insulted by Bible-thumping evangelicals who question her family’s religion, so she’s telling her mother’s supporters about their deep faith in God.

One Democrat took notes at a recent fundraiser and shared Chelsea’s speech with me.

If you compare what Chelsea actually said with the lede you can see ignorant bias on the part of D. Johnson is already raising its ugly head. I have no idea whether Page Six is conservative, liberal or somewhere in the middle, but it’s obvious the author has enough of a problem with the Clintons to skew Chelsea’s comments.

It was the author who applied the derogatory label “Bible-thumping evangelicals” not Chelsea.

The next whispered link in the chain was found at Mail Online which is a (cough) magazine (cough) rag well versed in the practice of getting stories wrong. Their article was titled “Chelsea Clinton says she left the pro-life Baptist church at age six because they talked about abortion in Sunday school”
And the lede for that article:

Chelsea Clinton claims she left a Baptist church as a child because they started talking about abortion in Sunday when she was just six years old.

I seriously question the intelligence of a writer who thinks a 6 year old child would change churches, from Baptist to Methodist, while her father still attended the Baptist church.

Chinese Whispers.

Link number three coming up. The story that makes up the third link of the whispered chain was written by David French and printed at National Review which I did not go to and will not link to, but I found it at a related site called The French Revolution hosted at sixseeds.patheos.com which again, I will not link to.

I’m going to use screenshots instead of quotes, just because I’m afraid of getting NR cooties on my cursor.

If you want to read it, here’s the URL - “sixseeds.patheos.com”

Wow.

Let’s take a look at this.

“Chelsea Clinton claims she left a Baptist church as a child because they started talking about abortion in Sunday when she was just six years old.”

[emphasis is mine]

1) No she did not say she left the church at age 6. She said she heard the church talking about abortion when she was six. No six year old child starts attending a different church than her parents.

2) She did not say that she left because the mention of abortion bothered her then six year old self, only that her memories of that topic being discussed in church made her uncomfortable as an adult.

I have to say it, David French simply cannot read for comprehension.

“Let’s make one thing clear — a six-year-old makes political statements only because she’s either reflecting her parents loudly-proclaimed views or because her parents are instructing her to act (most likely the latter).”

[emphasis is mine]

3) Let’s make one thing clear - Chelsea did not say, or even imply, that she did any of this when she was six. The only thing she claimed to have experienced at six is to have heard abortion discussed in church.

4) Her choice to leave the church & to make political statements came as an adult.

I couldn’t find the year Chelsea left the Baptist church, all I could find was the claim she made that she left the church before her dad did. Although Bill attended a Methodist church while in Washington (1993 - 2001), he was still attending a Baptist church in Little Rock in 2006, giving Chelsea up to the age of at least 26 to leave the Baptist church. An interesting point is that Chelsea was raised as a Methodist because of Hillary, so the idea of ‘changing ships’ as implied by the articles, loses credibility. Even as a child she was already a Methodist.

Okay, now for the final link in the chain of idiocy, we return to Bristol Palin, truly her mother’s daughter in mind and soul.

What kind of Mother would use her 6-year-old daughter to advocate for abortion? Hillary Clinton https://t.co/O6CpLECw9r

— Bristol Palin (@BristolsBlog) February 18, 2016

Bristol thinks Hillary used a six year old Chelsea to push Hillary’s anti abortion agenda.

Just think about that for a minute.

I ask you, does Palin’s tweet resemble in any way the words and meaning originally conveyed by Chelsea Clinton?

This is how the RW advances its agenda, through lies and idiocy.

Update: Apparently there is a link between Bristol Palin & David French, through his wife who writes Palin’s blog entries. H/T Stanley Sea.