I do not refer solely to the owners of joints like DU and the Cheeto. I'm talking about the rank-and-file yakkers and yowlers.
Everyone now more-or-less agrees that the Obots turned into an online mob. To what degree was this development rigged -- and who did the rigging?
This important piece by myiq2xu on The Confluence heads into the realm of conspiracy theory. In this case, I think such theories have merit.
The author discusses Obama's Great Speech On Race, delivered in response to the first iteration of the Reverend Wright controversy. As readers know, I considered the speech mediocre; the Ben-Stein-on-Xanax delivery certainly didn't improve matters. (When I jestingly referred to the Lightbringer as "Slowbama," I was -- but of course! -- called a racist.) And yet an online PR campaign briefly convinced the public that Obama had delivered the greatest example of political oratory since Pericles.
Even before the speech began I posted a snarky comment gushing about how wonderful and stupendous the speech was. I called it something like “Teh Greatestest Speech Evah.” I must have been psychic. Obama was still speechifying when the reviews began coming in. They weren’t just positive, they were orgasmic. Two separate commenters claimed to have been moved to tears just reading a transcript of the speech. But now the only thing people remember from the speech is poor grandma being thrown under the bus.I've noticed the same phenomenon. I do not refer to obvious examples of manipulation, such as the "Colleen" letter which was sent out to a number of different blogs, including this one. Something stranger and more subtle has been afoot.
But the immediate “reaction” to the speech crystalized a notion I had had for weeks. I had noticed numerous nearly identical comments being posted under different names simultaneously on different blogs. I started to watch for it and by the time of the ABC debate I had three windows open at once so I could quickly switch between comment threads on separate blogs. Watching the debate in real time while monitoring the comments made it obvious that someone, somewhere was directing the dissemination of talking points.
Anyone who has endured Obama trolls knows the way they all regurgitate the same tired memes, often word-for-word. Frequently, these trolls appear and disappear as if they are on shifts, with one replacing another right on the hour. Prove it, you say? I would if I could, and it doubtlessly will be proven some day in the future.
Internet presences with unfamiliar nicknames invaded Blogostan left and recited from an agit-prop script. The same comments, only slightly reworded, would appear in various forums.
More than that. None of this commentary displayed any hint of the introspection and self-doubt normally associated with leftists. Self-criticism has always differentiated the liberal from the conservative -- until the Hillary-haters rolled into town.
Right-wingers love to wallow in propaganda. Viewing life as a war (or as a football game), they unabashedly demonize the opposition and cheer for the home team. Lefties, by contrast, display a notorious inability to take their own side in an argument. A left-wing analysis traditionally takes the form of "On the one hand, X...on the other hand, Y." This careful weighing of opposites usually ends in a generalized cynicism which allows for neither heroes nor hope.
But the anti-Hillary crusade was different. An utter lack of self-doubt ruled the day. The prog-bloggers zoomed from one false accusation to another, and no matter how many times they were proven wrong, they just did not care.
I believe that this situation did not arise naturally. I believe that some organized force manipulated the online incarnation of the Democratic party.
The question is -- who did the manipulating? Team Obama? Or Team McCain?
The bulk of the evidence supports the former possibility, yet one should not discount the latter idea.
23 comments:
This whole thing with PUMA has Rove fingerprints all over it. Operating a fake "Obama supporters are jerks" campaign online wouldn't be that complex or costly and it would be very effective. The best part is that you only have to start the war. Human nature and the desire for revenge will sustain it afterwards.
As you're in an excellent position to appreciate, Mr. Cannon, many Obama supporters are hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool sociopaths. The creepy and remorseless narcissism they display even now ("I'm sorry" is not a phrase they comprehend) is the most obvious evidence of their personality disorder.
Joseph, I see you're not gay! It never occurred to me to consider your sexual preference until I read this post, and now that I have, I know you're heterosexual. I know this because if you were gay, you would have at least once in your life visited and chatted on Gay.com, and if there's one thing visitors in the gay.com chatrooms are familiar with are "bots"...chatterbots, chat bots, etc. The place is swarming with them. When Obama "trolls" started appearing en masse in the comment sections of pro-Hillary blogs, I KNEW many of them were generated by automated programs, they were too poorly written in almost every case. "I know what you mean, I don't like [insert subject not being discussed], but Obama's good for the country because....". I consider it spam. It is spam. Ironic that Obama fans shut down many blogs critical of their candidate by falsely accusing their owners of being generators of spam while Obama, his campaign and supporters did/do actively generate it on a massive scale.
Hmmm. There is a story over on Corrente by e.eye on some specific troll comments that seem to confirm the troll coordination theory:
http://www.correntewire.com/trolls_captured_in_their_natural_habitat
The fascist behavior of Obama supporters was on clear display at Democratic Underground.
Every day, a new false accusation against Hillary would be posted. Ironically, the word LIE was used a lot, always in caps ("Hillary LIES!!!").
The accusation would get debunked--but the Obamites would ignore this and go on repeating and amplifying the original lie.
Of course, any resemblance between this behavior and that of the right-wing smear machine should be ignored.
Other Obama people would chime in with more unsubstantiated lies about Hillary--and the inevitable misogynist wisecracks. Lies and smears were repeated dozens and dozens of times. People who disagreed would be placed on ignore or jettisoned from the forum.
The DU Obamites clearly made up many of these lies, then turned around and believed them--an act akin to sticking one's head up one's ass.
No form of character assassination against the Clinton family was ever rejected. The most idiotic Republican smears of the 90's began to appear--suggesting that progressives had always believed this crap.
So much for the theory that progressives are smart...
As with Freepers, even the most absurd accusations against the Clintons were instantly and uncritically believed, then repeated. The threads containing the smears would be recommended and placed on the DU "Greatest" page.
Within weeks, Democratic Underground had become an anti-Clinton porn site--like much of the rest of the liberal blogosphere.
Let's face it--no one hates Democrats more than progressives. As I watched DU turn into an anti-Clinton smear factory, I realized they had screwed us once again.
It's a well-coordinated plan.
I've laid this out clearly before but for those who have missed it, here is the link.
http://therealbarackobama.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/the-dean-plan-in-obama-we-trust-or-else-updated/
Robot scripts are par for the course. Anyone can make one. You'll find a number you can tweak for yourself on numerous free script sites. It's why blog and forum administrators with even half a clue require input in the form of a response to a question before allowing something through in public. I've modded every forum I admin to function this way.
For example, to make a post like this, rather than a simple image with a series of letters that one must copy for a post to go through (which is ridiculously easy to translate by additional automated scripts), a randomized question comes up that says something like "What color is the sky? blue, yellow, mauve, or green?" A robot script can't answer.
This has been the standard for fighting bot scripts for years now. Any admin of a blog or forum that hasn't implemented this and still gets comment spam is, quite simply, inept and/or lazy.
Well, I confess that I'm somewhat torn. To what degree was the "progressive Clinton-hate phenomenon engineered by smear-bots, and to what degree was it the result of the progressive left's longstanding and heartfelt antipathy for the mainstream Democratic party?
On the one hand...on the other hand...
When we look back at what occurred on DU during the first half of this year, we find ourselves in a position not unlike that of Number 6. How many Villagers are warders, and how many are prisoners? How many are in on the manipulative schemes engineered by Number 2, and how many are the victims of those schemes?
Say you're in a crowded bus or train station. If a certain number of people (seven, ten, twenty, whatever) start looking up at the ceiling, everyone will soon be craning their necks to see what the hell is going on up there. So: As you scan the crowd people looking up at the ceiling, how do you differentiate the ringers from the rubes?
By the way, kimmy -- no, I'm not gay. But I sure got ribbed a lot in high school for my love of classical music. In those days, if you liked Freddy Mercury or Elton John nobody questioned your masculinity. But Beethoven...
The "coordination" of the bloggers was WAY late in the game after the strongest candidates the Democrats had were shoved aside and forced out.
If one discounts the 24/7 propaganda by the media in favor of Obama and the exploitation by the GOP of loopholes in crossover voting and caucuses, he or she has really missed the point.
The nutroots do not exist in a vacuum. If there had not been the big media propaganda pushing for a McCain-Obama contest, the nutroots would never have gotten onboard with Obama. It's as simple as that.
We don't have fair elections anymore. Now corporations and Big Media tell us who our candidates will be, and they will do everything they can to make it happen.
The trouble with anonymous comments on blogs is that you don't (obviously) know who made them or who they are working for, if anyone. Which is why I generally ignore them.
Obviously some were attempting to create strife within the Democratic Party. I was not surprised that a leading PUMA person gave money to McCain. There is something very suspicious about PUMA.
We who spend hours reading and writing on-line tend to think that "we are it". I often wonder about the millions of Americans who don't read the internet at all, or those who do, but it's for many reasons other than politics.
In the world those other Americans inhabit, is the Democratic Party still as divided as we perceive it to be? Are we living in a kind of parallel political universe ?
Joseph, I agree with you. But I want to point something out that Ava and C.I. wrote back in April,
http://thirdestatesundayreview.blogspot.com/2008/04/tv-christ-child-fumbles.html
:
During the debate, the Obama campaign sent out several text messages to supporters urging them to take to several discussion boards and leave comments. The few that did so used multiple identites. It was appalling to see The New York Times report on how many 'people' posted comments at ABC News when the paper provided their own message board and, just looking at the IP addresses of the comments, would have demonstrated to them that the "many" were actually the few. Some commenting at the paper's boards, using multiple identities, would forget who they were posting as at any given moment providing laughter for anyone closely reading the full thread of comments.
Early on the text messages from the Obama campaign were telling people to say he was doing a great job. It was only in the second half of the debate, the so-called 'substance' portion, when he failed there as well that the campaign began texting people to complain about how 'unfair' the debate was.
A fascinating article on No Quarter by NancyA: "Obama's Acorn" http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/07/05/obamas-acorn/#more-3429 relating to the ACORN organization. Obama was a TRAINER for ACORN for years. They are known for disruptive and dominating mob tactics.
Having worked on a lot of campaigns, there is one aspect of healthy campaign management that is obviously quite missing in the Obama camp. Healthy campaigns spend a lot of time and effort keeping volunteers under control. Volunteers like doing bad things - it's an immense amount of fun. The Obama camp created a vaccum when it didn't distance itself from bad behavior and thus, in the vacuum, the bad behavior flourished. I haven't worked on a campaign in a few years, so I don't know what kind of safeguards campaigns are building in for online behavior. But the reason that you curb the rambunctiousness among your volunteers is that it pisses people off and ultimately, loses you votes. In the Obama's case, maybe even enough to lose him the election.
Obama's campaign has been very badly run in some important ways - significantly, he outspent Hillary to a huge degree and didn't quite tie her in the popular vote. That's bad.
But the big thing is the way his campaign has split the party. You should not running campaigns that are this destructive against other Democrats. I think he may have created a situation where we see a genuine relignment in the parties coming up.
I was posting awhile back on some of my favorite blog thread's when I noticed something odd about the way these Obots crawled in and out as if on shift. I have commented on this regularly. Anyone that has had the displeasure of witnessing these Obots at work know what I am talking about.
Anyone could see it. It was not like it was some NSA job. Poorly executed and infantile in it's approach.
There will be a reckoning over this "Some" day. I just hope those that participated it are treated as the leapers they are!
So now Obama will be attacked for his community organizing with ACORN?
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now
Answer is here: "George Soros Buys the Nomination; Obama Borrows It" By Ed Hamler.
Read that then ask yourself where the robot scripts came from.
Obama was promoted to destroy Clinton candidacy and its potential for a Rooseveltian solution to the onrushing financial collapse and fascism.
FISA bill just bill passed the Senate. Obama yea, Clinton nay.
FISA Amendments Act:
1. Retroactively legalizes massive electronic operation to spy on the personal communications of millions of Americans within the United States
2. Allows physical searches of Americans’ homes and places of work without a search warrant or any proof anyone is suspected of any crime
3. Allows same kind of unaccountable spying online and by telephone
4. The only person with the ability to stop the spying is the same person who orders it - The Attorney General of the United States
Obama rally stone's throw from Dem convention center in stadium. Riots threatened if Obama not slid smoothly in by the once-free citizens. Slick pasty-faced "unity candidate" awaits backstage.
Bloggers poised at keyboards.
Lest we forget, David Axelrod has a reputation as a master of astroturfing.
From the MotherJones blog: http://tinyurl.com/4wdcnk
ACORN is an offshoot of Soros's "Democratic Alliance." Read article I suggested above.
BTW, do you know only have to convince 175 of "Obama's" superdelegates that voting for Obama is not the beat choice, and it will be Senator Clinton onstage at Invesco Field?
http://www.puma08.com/2008/07/05/puma-call-to-dnc-delegates/
Conspiracy theory my arse. These guys openly organized online to recruit for groups offline to strategize talking points and organize online actions. The openly said they wanted to make Obama go viral. I saw it with my own eyes on dkos. As I posted at the Confluence:
I don’t know if you are aware, but there was at least one group on Kos who organized offline to make talking points go viral. They were quite open about it when they were advertising for membership in February or early March. I forget the name, but they used the same diary name for several diaries.
PS: Great post!
Sorry, but I no longer buy into "conspiracy theories". Although in some cases it looked like the concentrated effort of a few over zealous supporters who had no jobs or lives.
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