No one is saying the alleged Obama “plot on fishing” was part of an RNC fundraising campaign, but the off-base rumor-bomb has certainly caught fire among the “visceral” small-donor crowd. Media Matters has a round up on how the rightwing mediasphere has run with an evidence-free story that the Obama Administration in league with shady anti-recreation environmental groups is planning to ban sport fishing across the country.

It starts with a writer named Robert Montgomery typing feverishly at ESPNOutdoors. Media Matters:

obama fishing

On March 9, Robert Montgomery wrote for EPSNOutdoors.com: “The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters. This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is ‘fluid’ and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.” Montgomery’s post, which was also featured on The Daily Caller, has since been updated to state that the strategy “could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters” [emphasis added]. Montgomery also stated in the column:

Led by NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling, but its indifference to the economic, social and biological value of the sport has been deafening.

Additionally, Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June.

From there it makes the rounds: Gateway Pundit, Fox Nation, SayAnythingBlog, RedState and Colorado’s own, Michelle Malkin, who introduces the post as a piece “about Obama regulatory maneuvers.”

Why does Obama hate your rod and reel?

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