[singlepic id=62 w=360 h=280 float=right]
Wow, this is not my usual area of discussion, but it is just too funny to pass up. Apparently Dave Letterman made a joke about Sarah Palin’s family the other night. Now, as any aficionado of U.S. politics knows, Palin doesn’t take disparaging comments lightly, so they have been having this war of words.
Ok, I am not ashamed. So I admit it: I saw a tmz-type celebrity headline, which sent me to theinsider.com, and I began to read the comments, and the first 15-20 comments were all-but uniformly anti-Letterman, which was odd. So I kept going (there were 100 at that time), and they were almost all the same crap, again and again, maybe 85% of the whole. When I first went to the page it had been posted perhaps 12 hours previously.
That isn’t exactly the type of attitude one commonly sees on celebrity-watching blogs. So I thought, maybe this is some kind of bizarro conservative celebrity site, and I clicked around to check. On the front page at that time, there were two other vaguely political stories: Miss California loses her crown (remember that she holds some fairly controversial views) and American Idol runner-up comes out of the closet.
Nope, no conservative bias here, or at least not too much. The homosexuality story had 85 comments (posted 3-4 days ago) and there were only maybe one or two that were let’s say gay-negative. The Miss California story (posted at nearly the same as the Letterman story) only had 16 comments, and went about half and half.
So I looked a little closer at the comments to the post. And they were almost all anonymous, all with misspellings, many totally repetitive (Letterman is old and not funny any more). Every one of them continued with the same (tortured) argument that he was talking about Willow (which never made any sense whatsoever), and/or that he was talking about rape, which is an even bigger stretch. (If you click through that link, please remember that site allows subsequent comments, and you will notice that nearly 85-90% of the first hundred or so comments are basically the same.)
A couple of different approaches were used, but not for long. It was just ‘shame on such an old man to talk about the rape of a 14 year old girl!’ Wow.
And the really bizarre thing is, her flying attack monkeys went to that site, and just defaced it. Took a big poop right there. Note that she didn’t deploy her forces to argue on her behalf, or even organize perhaps a semi-coherent shaming campaign, or anything.
They just went there and wrote, again and again, Letterman sucks. For an hour or two I bet, initially, and I think they are still at it. Strangely, there seems to be little repetition of words or phrases, but only a few, basic if you will, ideas. Huh.
So, is it already well known that Sarah Palin has a little contingent of anonymous sockpuppets? Because this one is real, real obvious. Oh, and since that time some kind of spam bot has laid another 100 comments in there all at once, and the conversation is still going on at the bottom of that. God, U.S. politics has sunk so low.
Wow, I would love to see the insider’s ip tables.
[Update] Forgot the best part, from the article itself:
In response, a spokesperson for the governor said Thursday: “The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show.