Anatomy Of A Smear, Part Two: The Bogus Blog
Radar Online has the scoop on the website the MinuteMan alerted us to several days ago, the one that, amazingly, broke one of the biggest news stories of the year despite…well, let’s go to the excerpt:
ABCNews.com brought Mark Foley‘s boy-chasing to national attention, but it wasn’t the first website to flog the story. That dubious honor belongs to StopSexPredators, a pseudo-vigilante blog filled with plagiarized, hastily-assembled posts, which no one seems to have heard of, visited, or linked to before last week—and whose operator has a suspiciously savvy grasp of the news cycle.
In other words, a blog whose sole raison d’etre seems to have been to get the Foley ball rolling.
If its time/date stamps are to be trusted (like most free blogware, Blogger allows its users to backdate posts), the pervert-outing anony-site was set up on July 28 as a “clearing house for the public to report sex predators and as a resource for concerned citizens.”
One early post, headlined The Sickening Six, naming and shaming the “kinds of sick people who hunt minors for their own sick purposes,” is basically an amalgam of plagiarized entries from Crimelibrary, Wikipedia, and Answers.com. (Click here, here, and here, for examples.)
After running just six posts over the summer, the site picked up steam on September 21 when its author wrote, “the blog has been noticed and some shocking emails have been received!!!!” and posted four emails purportedly from “interns” outraged by the heretofore unmentioned Foley and his penchant for teenage boys.
(Of course, if these emails are legit, it means the “interns” somehow stumbled upon the blog, despite the fact that it had not yet been linked to by any other sites, and was virtually indetectible to Google, which ranks sites according to the number of incoming links.)
One “intern” wrote:
“…I came to Washington because I care about the future of America. I wanted to be around good and decent men like President George Bush. Instead, I feel like a piece of meat. The worst part of it for me is there appear to be plenty of my fellow interns who don’t mind Foley’s particular ‘path to power.’”
Three days later, the blogger posted the now infamous “Emails from Congressman Foley to 16 Year Old Page!!!!”, claiming they’d been sent in by a reader (despite the fact that they appeared to be scans of faxed printouts). Persons unknown then seeded the link to various political sites—including Wonkette, which promptly dismissed them as fakes. ABC, of course, took them more seriously.
Whoever promoted the story on DailyKos did so only 12 minutes after the fateful post went live at 11:06 a.m…
Let’s remember one thing: Hastert’s guilt or innocence (or, if you prefer, incompetence or ignorance) is a separate thing from the blatently apparent organized smear campaign. SOMEBODY is behind the timing of these revelations – that’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s an incontrovertible fact. The facts of this story smell to high heaven, there’s no doubt; but so do the circumstances surrounding its revelation.
Some shoes are yet to fall…
Fordham is gay.
http://www.blogactive.com/2004/07/action-write-to-kirk-fordhamat-mel.html
This story is offically unraveling.
simple plot line? gay male defends his former gay boss and lies to the house leadership, running cover for him.
This is ending badly for dems.
I don’t know; is that really a significant angle? I mean, isn’t the story here really whether Hastert and the other GOP big dogs took significant action with whatever information they knew, and not whether one or more of the participants was gay?…
another source.
http://www.washingtonblade.com/2004/7-23/news/national/antigaysen.cfm
All that rage that the dems have been frothing up in the conservatives is about to be released upon them.
gop leaders say they didn’t know.
the guy who is saying that he personally briefed and told them is gay. He started working for foley and became his chief of staff. I will bet an addtional ten dollars that the two of them went on a junket to Thailand. you know there is record of many ‘boys’ only travel.
I’ll take hastert’s words over a homosexual who has worked for foley and KNOWS what a piece of crap he is.
Would he cover for Foley? hell yes.
Whether there was a smear campaign or not is incidental. If you act in a scandalous way, then you have no reason to complain about the timing of the scandal’s revelation.
To turn the matter around: Gennifer Flowers was paraded around to the press during the Presidential campaign of 1992. Would you disavow her accusations because the timing was politically motivated?
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/09/ex-foley-chief-of-staff-now-chief-of.html
good story. raises the issue of what exactly was fordham doing, going to Foley and then to abc on his behalf, when you are working as someone elses chief of staff?
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/10/02/night/index.html
salon covering the story, even addressing the question-who is Kirk fordham?
they fail to mention the gay part. I wonder what his IM messages will tell us.
wonder if fordham handled the pimping for just foley, or other reps as well.
We now have two gay villians, both republicans-everybody is going to be pleased.
have you seen drudge lately?
a couple of hours ago-”abc accidentally releases pages name”
an hour later-it has been determined that the im presented as an underage boy, was if fact 18.
this is worse than rathergate. The backlash is going to be termendous on so many fronts. media, gays, the left…
how can rove function if he gets hospitalized from laughing? the dems are smart.
Yeah that’s right its about being gay! You just can’t trust those gays, they’ll turn on you every time. Luckily for the GOP we managed to identify these perverts and purge them from the purest of parties. Whether Fordham is gay or not doesn’t speak to whether what he is saying is true. As this event unfolds I’m sure there will be plenty of documents and/or testimony to support or refute his statements. The issue is not going to be whether Foley and Fordham are gay, it is not going to be whether Foley solicited teenagers, it is going to be when the House Republican leadership found out about Mr. Foley’s “indiscretions”, and if it was more than 3 months or so, why they didn’t act on that knowledge. The Republican party as presently constituted has a big problem–there are homosexuals in positions of power throughout the party, but their value to the party cannot be acknowledged. What a waste. The fruits of hypocrisy.
I hope this whole thing backfires on the libs, but right now, the Republican Party has taken it up the a**. No pun intended. The GOP is screwed for the midterms. OTOH, when folks see how bad a job the Dems will do in their 2 years, the GOP will get put back in, so it’ll work out. If we aren’t all speaking Arabic by then.
Foleygate Reloaded
Glass houses and all that.
“Yeah that’s right its about being gay!”
the congressman was gay. the pages were gay. his chief of staff was gay. the source of the notification to gop leadership is gay. the guy who was fired is gay. the guy who covered for foley is gay.
yep, it’s about the gays.
6 million.
The amount foley will take from abcnews for reporting the IMs as the product of a minor.
So much for that theory. It appears the mysterious whistleblower is a GOP congresional staffer. So reports the The Hill.
“The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide.”
The first paragraph indicates that the ‘source’ received his info from a gop aide.
you didn’t do well on the gre’s reading section, did you?
even better-the ‘source’ will be named in the lawsuit foley has aginst abcnews.
They may have taken the source at his word, that the im’s were from a minor, and now are liable because of his false representation and their reporting.
watch abc scramble to get his name out.
Fair enough, Anonymous…but there’s still something funky about that website…I’ll admit the Hill story throws a bit of cold water on the idea of an organized smear initiating the scandal…but I also maintain there’s still a shoe to drop here…we’ll see…
Also, who is the source? How long did the source sit on this information? The Hill report doesn’t answer ALL the questions…
Ha. Why don’t you keep reading, mtl. Here’s the very next paragraph:
The whistleblower is the GOP aide. The “source” is just an intermediary. The point is that these emails were given to news outlets by a GOP staffer. This isn’t some nefarious left wing plot.
It appears that the source/intermediary tried to give the emails to various news outlets in July. Those outlets apparently felt they didn’t have enough to publish. My guess is that the website was started either by someone connected with the staffer/source, or by a frustrated journalist trying to go around their editors.
This is pure speculation
“The “source” is just an intermediary.”
The unnamed source of an unnamed source…yep you got something there.
Let me take a wild stab at this…
the ‘intermediary’ is gay, and if his ‘source’ actually exists, will also prove to be gay. If his source is not who he says it is, then that would make the intermediary the source of the info.
This is why the dems never went near the ‘page issue’. It was a freakin hunting ground for gay men in DC. I’m getting vision of high paid prostitutes of questionable age.
Studds had his bevy to chose from, which kinda sets the precedent for the page system to be used as a meat market. The homosexual community kept it up and running, and now they have turned on each other.
Every rep who isn’t out of the closet, is about to get yanked, and quite a lot of aides on both sides of the isle are about to be put under the spotlight.
That’s progressive planning at its best.
Its not a smear if it is true.
Likewise, motivation is irrelevant if it is true.
I saw earlier that the nro was sharing al’s claim that a gop-aide was the source. wasn’t ready to do a correction at the time…but
It would now appear that he was an unwilling source-ie he was never the actual whistle-blower. That would mean, if there was no gop-aide who is a whistleblower then the ‘source’ is the intermediary.
No ‘noble’, ‘acting the behalf story’…
just the opposite. the intermediary, which is now shown to be the source, is a democratic operative. He was the one who saved the im’s. He was the one who told abc news that ‘jordi’ was a minor. He was the one who falsely represented his own actions, presenting himself as bringing this for his ‘friend’ jordi.
In time, you get to find out whose staff the actual source was on, maybe, rahm emmanuel? then you get to ask, why they sat on this til october.
excuse me, the ‘fbi’ gets to ask…