Dirty Tricks by Republican Operatives
TrI recently read How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, by Allen Raymond and Ian Spiegelman” Raymond was a Republican operative, famously responsible for a denial-of-service attack on the Democratic HQ during a campaign in New Hampshire. (Speigelman is the ghost writer.)
In all fairness, if Raymond is telling the truth, most (but not all) of Republicans did not know he was doing this, and probably would not have sanctioned it. Given how harsh he is on the Republicans, I’m inclined to believe this claim.
The book is coyly written as if it were a mea culpa, whereas it’s also bragging. Of course he takes pot-shots at former colleagues, especially the ones who participated in the attack and left him hanging out to dry.
I’m not saying that Democrats are angels, but it seems to me that their unethical actions tend more towards putting friends on the payroll and such, rather than actually making our democratic/republican political system more corrupt. The latter is far worse. If more and more of our citizens lose faith in our political system, we lose social capital that is hard to regain.
Perhaps because I just read this book, I am predisposed to think that the following story from AlterNet is plausible: Conservatives have been gaming Digg:
First paragraph: “A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.”
If this be true, it’s alarming. Could it apply to other sites such as reddit (whose story about this has many of the screen names used by the Republican operatives)?
I was unable to find any corroboration; just lots of links the story, including on Digg). I also could not find any answer from Digg. If anyone reading this sees one, I’d be much obliged if you’d add a comment to this essay with a pointer thereto.
I was unable to find a reply at Digg’s web site, although I did find links to a bunch of very interesting stories. I tend to avoid Digg, reddit, et. al., because they are too good! I get distracted from what I’m really trying to do. Empty, casual browsing is so much less spiritually satisfying than browsing for deeper reasons.
Thanks to my wonderful friend and former co-worker Paul Harsha for bringing this to my attention.