Election Skullduggery – Page 3

Flying Buttmonkeys Rn’t Us

Published on April 12, 2009

buttmnky

Why does Ray Collins, General Secretary of the Labour Party, own, on behalf of the Labour Party, the domain names

and

davidcameronseconomicpolicy.co.uk?

For negative campaigning, duh. As I’ve said before, New Labour’s studied Karl Rove’s methods very closely. But not quite closely enough.

Like pushpolling and fake leaflets a classic Rovian ploy is to buy up all your opponents’ potential domain names and park them, with page of misleading information – or just plain lies, it doesn’t matter, by the time they get it taken down the campaign’ll be over – about your opponent put up as a placeholder. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth’s got its boots on, has always been the Rovian motto.

He may have studied Rove’s methods and he may be equally porcine, but Charlie Whelan‘s no Rove and he missed something vital that Rove never did.

Deniability.

Rove knew to hide GOP dirty domain-name tricks behind interlocking puzzles of holding companies and consultants – his hands were never actually seento be dirty. Unlike Labour, which registered smear domains in plain sight for any idiot blogger to do a lookup on, and put its name and address at the bottom of the pages too.

No doubt No 10 spins such stupidity as ‘transparency’.

The Republicans also had an army of flying butt monkeys, insane wingnut commenters, who spammed and trolled opposition blogs and launched DOS attacks against anyone posing a threat online. Again deniability; all were independent commenters, see, no connection to any party, no sir. What email lists and talking points?

Labour doesn’t have anything approaching an army of even pedestrian buttmonkeys; at most it has a few spotty, ambitious youths with Blackberries and a handful of loyal, ageing party apparatchiks with lots of time on their hands trolling the Guardian’s comment section. Labour MPs do look as though they eat plenty of Cheetos though, and most do appear to live in Mom’s basement or at least claim a second home allowance for it.

They failed at blogs and Labour’s efforts at online dirty tricks are an epic fail too. If you want to see quite how epic take a look at their spin doctor scripted, Cameron/Osborne ‘livechat’. They’re just incompetent at everything, even at being evil.

Go Go Gadget Guido

Published on April 12, 2009

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I’m loving this whole Guido/leaked emails/No10 cabal thing, but for those who haven’t been following the saga of Dolly Draper and his fateful entanglement with the blogosphere it may all be a bit confusing. Who is Damien McBride, and more to the point, why is such a jumped-up poisonous little toad of a bitchy party functionary being paid from the public purse?

The meat of the emails – Frances Osborne’s nuts, George O. took drugs, Cameron had the clap and so on, all of it patently untrue – can be found at the Sunday Times too, as can background on the No. 10 relationships and the personalities of those involved. Their conclusion? Gordo’s up to his moral compass in it.

I think that the Observer has picked up best on the meta-implications of this, the first real blog-driven UK political sleaze scandal:

Smears are, of course, a staple of politics not confined to any one party, but the charge against McBride and Draper is not just one of dirty tricks but of hamfisted meddling in a new media world they did not properly understand.

The vendetta between senior Brownites and Guido Fawkes, the Westminster blogger who obtained the emails, dates back to stories Fawkes – whose real name is Paul Staines – posted about the Smith Institute and its relationship to Ed Balls, also a close friend of McBride.

Shortly afterwards journalists began being offered snippets designed to undermine Staines, including news of his drink-driving conviction. Coincidence? Staines, say friends, does not think so. His blog continued targeting senior Labour figures, and its waspish attacks got under Labour’s skin. When Draper launched LabourList, it was not long before they crossed swords – with Staines questioning Draper’s qualifications as a therapist and Draper threatened to sue.

Ah yes, LabourList. I believe ‘pisspoor”s the word. A Daily Kos wannabe without a Kos, without Kos’ commenters, or Kos’ content, run by a gang of bitchy, provincial stalinist hairdressers.

Whatever his qualifications may or not be Draper didn’t fail Hypnotism 101; to have convinced anyone that a shambling, unshaven, disaster of a walking midlife crisis was still young and hip and in tune enough with the Obama generation to start a blog community from scratch – 5 years too late – boggles the mind.

I can imagine Dolly’s spiel to Mandelson: “Yeah, sure, give me a couple of hundred grand and blogosphere will be in your power, trust me I’m a clinical psychologist now wahaha” and Mandy falling for it because he doesn’t read blogs or email and that whole interwebs thingy passed him by, he has a man to do it for him.

Labour’s public engagement with social media’s been a disaster wrapped in an embarassment, with an extra layer of mortification. Whatever they’ve tried they’ve fucked up, either because of general town-hall level stupidity or their desire to use technology purely as a channel for own personal vindictiveness and political rigidity.

There’s a whole building full of strutting, puffy flushed vain little Labour men at No 10, just like McBride, half of whom who think, like Gordon Brown, that social media means social control media. The other half see Facebook as a brilliant way to get back at people they’ve always hated; they don’t see blogging as the political movement in itself that it undoubtedly is but as a means to an end, viz, the personal and political character assassination of your opponents.

But their featherbedding and disengagement with actual life as lived by other people has blinded them to the political power that one person with a pc and intenet access can wield these days.

Despite their efforts to lock down their own residents and prohibit them from ever expressing political dissent, by recording all their emails, phone calls and internet use – and mine, if I ever want to speak to my sons again – bloggers continue to expose Labour for what they are.

It doesn’t matter they can no more physically record everything than they can drain the ocean, it’s public perception that matters – they’re watching you.

It may well one day be only those of us based elsewhere, like Guido Fawkes, who are actually able to blog about political wrongdoing, such is the thicket of New Labour new laws and restrictions being woven around citizen access to bandwidth and the right to free expression.

I disagree vehemently with Guido Fawkes on many many things, both personal and political, but what I do admire him for is for sticking to his guns, cultivating his sources and consistently coming up with the goods. Again and again he’s shown that Labour are little people with little morals, little substance, little brains and little credibility. I don’t care if he’s Pol Pot.

UPDATE I
Haha, Draper just got fired live on tv.

Comment of The Day

Published on October 25, 20082 Comments

[Flickr image by Nashmj]

At Talking Points Memo, on McCain volunteer Ashley Todd and the Obama-mugger that never was:

I was coming out of Starbucks this afternoon when a big fat hillbilly ran over to me and knocked my half-caf soy latte out of my hand and said “You look like an Obama supporter, I’m going to teach you to support McCain”. Then he knocked me to the ground and pulled out a swiss army knife. “I’m going to carve an ‘M’ in your face, liberal,” he insisted, and then he paused,”How do you spell, ‘M'” , he asked. “Well, then, I’m going to make you squeal like a pig…”

Or, maybe I just dreamed this at my desk after lunch. I did doze off for a moment…it is SO HARD to tell dreams from reality, these days.

Posted by c4Logic in reply to a comment from TheraP

UPDATE

I see the National College Republicans, for whom Todd worked, have about as much human feeling a the rest of their kind. Despite the fact McCain and Cindy jumped at Todd’s story, expressing public sympathy all over the airwaves when they thought they could use her to bolster the campaign with the racist base, now that she’s been found out she’s become a non-person.

CRNC Statement on Ashley Todd

When Ms. Todd initially contacted us claiming to have been attacked our first reaction was obviously to be concerned for her safety. We are as upset as anyone to learn of her deceit, Ashley must take full responsibility for her actions.

We have terminated her effective today.

Don’t Count Your Chickens

Published on October 24, 2008

Despite more and more high profile Republican defections to Obama, party candidates McCain and Palin are still rolling with the all-hate, all-the-time roadshow, and the army of flying buttmonkeys is still on the march:

Indiana Star, Oct 23, 5:59 PM EDT

Clerk left letters calling Obama “black Hitler”

FRANKLIN, Ind. (AP) — A Republican county election clerk distributed copies of an apparent chain letter referring to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama as a “young, black Adolf Hitler” to two employees but later told police she intended it to be a joke.

The employees, who had voted for Obama in Indiana’s Democratic primary, discovered the letters at their desks after returning from Labor Day weekend, Deputy Sheriff Doug Cox said in a police report made public this week. One of the workers complained, and surveillance video showed Johnson County Clerk Jill Jackson placing an item one worker’s desk at 5:27 p.m. on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Cox said.

From the text quoted in the article it may well have been this piece of crap , which has spammed just about every comment site out there.

Even the local Republican chair professed himself shocked:

Doug Lechner, Republican Party chairman in the county just south of Indianapolis, said the letter was unacceptable and taints Jackson’s ability to appear unbiased in administering this year’s election. County clerks are responsible for training poll workers, providing all voters an opportunity to cast their ballot without influence, and overseeing vote counts.

“She’s in a sensitive position and she has to give all the appearance of fairness,” Lechner said.

This is one county in one state. How many more thousands of others are just like it with politically biased election administrators?

I’ve blogged about Republican entryism before and how, over the past decade or more, the Right has taken control of the actual voting process by installing palpably biased election officials; the DOJ attorney scandal is just the logical flowering of a long process of deliberate political infiltration. Then there’s the voting machines and the caging and the foreclosure challenges and shutting down polling stations…take this one clerk and multiply her exponentially, produce an army of deliberate obstructionists and saboteurs.

We at the Christian Coalition are raising an army who cares. We are training people to be effective — to be elected to school boards, to city councils, to state legislatures, and to key positions in political parties…. By the end of this decade, if we work and give and organize and train, THE CHRISTIAN COALITION WILL BE THE MOST POWERFUL POLITICAL ORGANIZATION IN AMERICA
– Pat Robertson, in a fundraising letter, July 4, 1991

There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore.

Pat Robertson, address to his American Center for Law and Justice, November, 1993.

Taking political control over what should unbiased is part of the Right’s strategy and always has been: as Bush senior himself said more than once, politics at base is all about the process and who controls it. The netroots are all very well when it comes to raising funds, but how does that translate into Democrat election judges or supervisors to balance out the malignity of the GOP and maintain a fair election?

Those liberal bloggers celebrating early’d might want to hold their fire, because the results may not necessarily be what they expect. There’s a lot of damage to an unbiased vote that an army of obstructionists and saboteurs can do.

On the other hand, when even Scott McLellan is voting Obama, perhaps times are actually changing. But has anyone remembered to tell the troops?

[Image from Squidoo]

What The …?

Published on October 21, 2008

This is a very strange and unsettling story, even leaving aside the wanton cruelty:

Dead bear covered with Obama signs found at school

Oct 20th, 2008 | CULLOWHEE, N.C. — Police at Western Carolina University and wildlife officials were investigating the discovery early Monday of a dead bear cub draped with a pair of Barack Obama campaign signs.

Leila Tvedt, associate vice chancellor for public relations, said Monday night that maintenance workers found the 75-pound bear cub shot to death in front of the school’s administration building at the entrance to campus. The Obama yard signs were stapled together and placed over the bear’s head, Tvedt said.

The bear had been shot in the head, Tvedt said.

More…

Is it a message? A direct threat? Is the bear cub supposed to represent Obama? What? I can’t begin to fathom the mindset of a person who would deliberately hurt another creature to make a political point.