There are plenty of trolls and agents provocateurs in the world. Personally, I'm getting tired of seeing their stupid posts copied over to FR. For all I know, you posted this garbage there yourself, just so you could re-post it on FR and claim it tells us something about Obama. Assuming you didn't, you're certainly doing exactly what the authors of the garbage want people to do with it.
Well, there is a very good chance that you are absolutely 100% on target with your conclusion. And as you state, assuming he didn’t, you’ve expressed what my thoughts on it are.
McCain being unsellable, we are going over the line to destroy Obama. None of us are going to vote for the man. Zero, zip, nada... If I’ve seen more than five people here over the last six months who have said they may vote for him, I’d be surprised. When I have seen it, I have encouraged them not to.
To me it seems like we are verging on becoming the reverse of DailyKOS, DU, and Moveon.org. Frankly... no thanks. Counter them? Hell yes. Adopt their tactics? Hell no.
Wow, GS! Good post!
Re: “For all I know, you posted this garbage there yourself, just so you could re-post it on FR and claim it tells us something about Obama. Assuming you didn’t, you’re certainly doing exactly what the authors of the garbage want people to do with it.”
I did not post this material at MyBO but, assuming I did (and this is the kind of accusation that could have come from Obama’s camp or MoveOn.org, which used the same excuse in 2006), Obama’s moderators could have removed it on the spot. They certainly proved themselves capable of removing quotes from “Dreams From My Father” and Michelle Obama’s thesis—with specific page numbers as opposed to the urban legends—within 36 hours, and disabling the account from which it was posted. On the other hand, stuff about “Zionist Thought Police” was left online for months. This should tell you where MyBO’s moderators’ priorities lie.
FR’s moderators were quite capable of locking threads, deleting comments, and threatening to hand out suspensions when people made inappropriate remarks about Ted Kennedy’s illness, and they did so on an almost real time basis. That is because FR is NOT MoveOn.org, Kos, or My.BarackObama.com. As far as I know, FR’s moderators don’t even get paid. Obama has paid staff members to keep agents provacateur—if that is what they really are—off his site.
Your argument could easily be turned around. How do we know that Obama’s staff members didn’t post some of this stuff—not the anti-Semitic hate speech, which reflects badly on his campaign, but the rumors about McCain having a neurodegenerative disease—to encourage its widespread circulation? Obama could deny that he approved it while blaming it on trolls, agents provacateur, and so on while reaping its benefits.