For quite a while, conservatives have embraced an annoying strategy — trawl through liberal blogs’ comments sections in the hopes of finding intemperate remarks. The right then takes these comments to “prove” that the left is made up of unhinged radicals.
The practice has always been rather self-defeating. In fact, about a year ago, Kevin Drum came up with a sensible maxim: “If you’re forced to rely on random blog commenters to make a point about the prevalence of some form or another of disagreeable behavior, you’ve pretty much made exactly the opposite point.” Eventually, the practice was even given a name: “Nutpicking.”
And now, “nutpicking” has reached the presidential campaign level.
Little Green Footballs, a prominent far-right blog, had this item yesterday:
A search of the official my.barackobama.com site for “Jewish Lobby” reveals an enormous amount of antisemitic hatred being posted…. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of posts that refer to the “Jewish lobby” at the Obama site. I stopped looking at the results on page 10. […]
By the way, it is absolutely no excuse to say that “anyone can post a blog there.” Barack Obama isn’t running a Blogspot blog, he’s running for president of the United States, and his official web site is full of hatred and antisemitism.
LGF’s criticism was interesting in part because it was only partially attacking Obama. The candidate, the argument goes, is wrong for having a forum filled with ugly content, even if the campaign didn’t produce the content. And, the argument continues, it speaks poorly of the campaign in general that it attracts people who’d provide the ugly content in the first place.
There are a couple of problems with this approach. First, the Obama campaign (to its credit) created an open online forum. Anyone can “post a blog there,” and it’s not the campaign’s fault when someone adds offensive content. Second, the campaign has moderators to delete the truly ridiculous posts and comments, but it’s hard to keep up with the level of abusive text. That’s just a practical, logistical problem, but it hardly speaks to bigotry within the campaign or among the campaign’s supporters in general.
And third, conservatives forgot to check John McCain’s site before running with this.
The Jed Report explained:
As I wrote yesterday, the Little Green Freakshow (aka Little Green Footballs) lied when it claimed that Barack Obama’s website reveals a disturbing pattern of antisemitism.
Well, I can now report to you that their ridiculous claim has also blown up in their face. Apparently, LGF forgot to check if there was any objectionable filth on any of their man John McCain’s official campaign forums, and not surprisingly, it turns out there is. In fact, a quick check last night revealed at least one use of the N-word to describe Barack Obama, among other smears.
The Jed Report found all kinds of offensive content on McCain’s site, none of which the campaign was responsible for, but all of which was readily found with minimal effort. John Aravosis also found a ton of disgusting content on McCain’s campaign site, including racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and anti-Islamic comments.
And what does this tell us about McCain and his supporters? Not a whole lot. That’s the point — once one goes nutpicking, they can find crazy content, but it doesn’t prove anything.
Honestly, I thought conservatives had matured a bit, and learned some lessons over the last few years. Remember when MoveOn.org invited people to put together their own campaign ads four years ago? Some nut put together a Nazi-driven piece, put it on the site without the group’s knowledge, and the right shouted, “See?! MoveOn.org is comparing Bush to Hitler!”
But there’s just no excuse to keep playing the same dumb game. The Obama campaign was about as responsible for anti-Semitic content on its site as the McCain campaign was for its anti-Semitic content. Both campaigns have a handful of nutty supporters. That’s a shame, but it’s hardly evidence of a scandal.
The Jed Report added:
[L]et me stress that I find this “issue” utterly stupid. Not only are there bound to be some bad apples in any mass movement, but there’s also no way of knowing who posted what and why they posted it. For all we know, most if not all of these posts could be attempts at political sabotage. On balance, both the McCain and Obama campaigns have done an impressive job of maintaining an open community while eliminating most of the undesirable elements.
And that’s a whole lot more noteworthy that whatever garbage right-wing blogs can dig up from user-created content.