Did Michelle Obama Turn Back the Odometer When Selling an Expensive Car?
Holy moly! That's a provocative, attention-getting headline, isn't it?
Seriously: did Michelle Obama pay someone to turn back the odometer of a 2009 $125,000 Bentley Continental Flying Spur so that it she could convince an unwitting buyer that it had been driven for only 15,000 rather than for 215,000 miles?
You'd think that even this accusation would be front-page news everywhere, wouldn't you? Now imagine if she and the President had settled the lawsuit against them out of court after an expert premium auto sales witness testified that it was the worst instance of fraud of its kind he had ever seen?
Respect for the First Lady be damned -- we would not be hearing about any other story right now!
So, you ask -- did Michelle Obama do this?
Answer after the filigree:
No, she didn't. I just made the whole thing up.
I don't think that she's ever owned a car nearly that expensive and I've never even heard of her being accused of fraud at all -- let alone for 1/8 of a million bucks.
Instead, that was aspiring First Lady Ann Romney, who sold a dressage horse that could no longer perform dressage for $125,000 to an unsuspecting buyer after paying for the injection of a cocktail of painkillers that an expert witness said was unprecedented in his experience.
This story is a bit over a day old. I did some searching at June 22, ~1:00 PDT for top headlines.
I didn't bother checking Fox or the major networks. Maybe I'll update.
Again -- if it had just been disclosed yesterday that Michelle Obama had been sued for defrauding someone in the sale of a Bentley for $125,000, I think that it would still be top news. Don't you?
I would think that this story would be a Super Hit. (That's the name of the horse, too. Nice hook, eh?)
1:57 PM PT:
I've now done some additional research. My sense is that the story burst onto social media yesterday (which is when I first saw it) or the day before, but the first mention I see is in this Los Angeles Times story of May 22, which was followed by this fawning New York Times story from May 27 and then this somewhat less indulgent story (but still with a pretty picture!) from the Washington Post on May 29.
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