The Phony Campaign

2012-07-29 Update

[phony baloney]

Another week of nothing much to see here:

Query String Hit Count Change Since
2012-07-22
"Barack Obama" phony 22,800,000 +600,000
"Mitt Romney" phony 1,190,000 +100,000
"Gary Johnson" phony 462,000 +50,000

But, as usual, there's plenty of new phony news:

  • USNews reported that Ben Sarma (an actual human being) noticed something funny on the Twitter:

    [Ben Sarmas]

    That might have made a pretty good scene in a sci-fi movie about an impending clone takeover. But here's the thing: all those other accounts were followers of Mitt Romney. And they were not alone, as reported by Mr. Zach Green:

    Green reported that after Romney's account gained only 3-4,000 new followers per day over the past month, it quite suddenly picked up 23,926 new followers on Friday, 93,054 on Saturday and 25,432 on Sunday.

    Romney's account wasn't getting an equivalent increase in mentions, however, suggesting the Twitter followers were not coming in organically.

    Geez, ya think?

    The obvious theory, notes Will Oremus at Slate, is that Mitt's trying to artificially pump up his Twitter follower numbers. But there's no obvious benefit to that, and plenty of downside, so Oremus (to his credit) also entertains Theory B: " Some Obama supporter surreptitiously bought the followers on Romney's behalf, to make him look bad."

  • The headline is "'Key & Peele' Stars Recall Witnessing Obama Fake His Own Poisoning Death." If you don't know: Key & Peele is a show on Comedy Central, and its stars are a couple of guys named Key and Peele. And they were watching President Obama perform his weekly radio address. After being offered a bottle of water from a bystander,…

    "So she gives him the bottle of water and my man goes like this, 'so we need to...,'" before Peele abruptly slouched over and put his head on his chest to recall how U.S. President feigned he'd just been poisoned, before Obama straightened up with a big grin across his face.

    Gosh, that's hilarious!

  • The Washington Post provides an article entitled "What drives the Obama doubters and haters?"

    My input was not requested for the article, but as one of those "doubters", I'd have to say, … um… it has something to do with Obama's devotion to bankrupt political philosophy, dysfunctional economic policies, unconstitutional power grabs, massive hypocrisy, and non-stop rhetorical mendacity.

    But that's just me.

    Irony of ironies, the Post's article is written by David Maraniss, author of a recent Obama biography that showed, … well, let him tell it:

    There are Obama doubters and haters out there who claim with righteous anger that they are "vetting" the president, something they say the mainstream media never did. Some of them have said that my new biography -- unwittingly, they argue, for I am too dumb to understand what my research has unearthed -- proves that Barack Obama's defining memoir is phony and that his entire life is a fraud.

    Well, close. Here's one reaction:

    The new book by Mr. Maraniss suggests that the real story of Mr. Obama's life was less dramatic -- and more routine -- than the president made it out to be in the memoir.

    This "doubter and hater" was Michael D. Shear, writer for that scurrilous right-wing rag, the New York Times. Generally speaking, Maraniss's book told the story of a guy who pretty much loved to make stuff up about his life, in order to buttress whatever image he was trying to market at the time.

    Maraniss goes on and on about birthers, racists, and related conspiratoid nutjobs. Really, if those folks didn't exist, guys like Maraniss would invent them. Wild-eyed fanatics and bigots fit their narrative so well! For who else would be a "doubter" of our wonderful leader?


Last Modified 2014-12-01 2:54 PM EDT