John McCain Breeding an Army of Trolls
I haven't written much about presidential politics in here. Believe me, I'm as happy as anyone that the end of ShrubCo is coming nigh after eight years of watching my country being turned into a deserved laughing stock. Of the eight presidencies during my lifetime, that of Bush II has been the worst for everyone except the super-rich and power-connected. I'll readily admit that I'm in full agreement with Dennis Kucinich who gave an impassioned, detailed and well-reasoned speech on the floor of the House a couple of days ago as to why the current presidency should not only end immediately but should have ended years ago. This hasn't gotten much buzz in the press, but I caught it on C-Span and various parts of it have made their way to YouTube, including the segment embedded here:
Still, as happy as I am about Dubya going back to clearing brush in Crawford, Texas on a permanent basis, I'm not all that excited about the two major party candidates. I started the primary season hoping against remote odds that Bill Richardson could get somewhere, but of course he didn't. Then I was marginally in favor of Hillary Clinton. Obama is my third choice from among the field of Democratic contenders, but I'll vote for him because if a bag of stale corn chips were running against John McCain I'd be casting my ballot for President Doritos in November.
The McCain Campaign's fiendish plot to breed an army of trolls chartered with spamming blogs with cut-and-paste text provided on their website doesn't do a thing to change my perception that McCain is insane in the membrane. While I may be channeling a bit of Dr. Seuss in that statement, I'm doing so here on my home blog.
The McCain campaign is exhorting the Xerox-minded to
Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you've commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.Below those marching orders and commensurate promise of "points" appears a list of links to blogs. Below that appear "talking points" to be used on the targeted blogs.
To my mind, this is nothing but an invitation to troll. As you may have noticed, I moderate comments on this blog, and I do that in part because there are people who do exactly what McCain is asking his supporters to do with other cut-and-past responses. On any given day I'll delete a number of potential comments here that are nothing but cut-and-pasted Bible texts, commercial spams, and other such complete reproductions of what somebody else says. What McCain is asking his loyalists to do is really no different
Anyone interested in what McCain has to say can hear him on television, read his words in the newspaper, and even visit his website. That includes readers of Daily Kos or this blog or any other blog or no blogs at all. That doesn't require trolling the comments sections of those blogs, though. That's an annoyance, and I'm even less likely to vote for someone who is telling his followers to get in my face and do so in a manner which involves no reflection at all on their part. In fact, that's largely my problem with American Conservatism in a nutshell; it's mainly talking points and spin that relies on uncritical acceptance of authoritative statements. McCain's blog strategy looks to me like Rush Limbaugh's Dittoheads vomiting all over the web. Why in the world would I support such things?
All McCain's blog strategy does for me is point out that McCain just doesn't get it, and that's a big part of why I wasn't going to vote for him in the first place. Seeing him reward obedience with "points" doesn't change my mind about him one bit.
