Thursday, October 23, 2008

"Sounds suspicious ..."

Just came across an excellent summation by Hendrik Hertzberg, titled "Voter-Fraud Fraud," that tears apart the ACORN nonsense that the McCain campaign and the rest of the GOP has been trying to sell.

Send a copy to everyone who has ever forwarded you an anti-Obama email.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

*Send a copy to everyone who has ever forwarded you an anti-Obama email.*

LOL, good idea. Did I tell you I've been collecting wingnut email addresses? Whenever someone forwards me one of those "Obama is a Muslim" chain emails, I harvest all the email addresses and add them to a special "wingnut" distribution list so I can send them reality-based news and information. I consider it a public service, sort of like throwing a lifeline to a drowning child.

bjkeefe said...

Awesome. I considered doing that, but I never got enough of those emails to build up a worthwhile mass.

It'd be great if you heard on November 5th from a couple of those people on your list, saying that you'd changed their mind.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that would. Especially since not all of those recipients are necessarily wingnuts. Like you, I never really got many of those crazy emails, but a couple of months ago a friend of mine forwarded me a couple he got at work. He gets a lot of email from random people he's in touch with via his job, so I asked him to forward me all of the nutty email he gets going forward.

The other day I got the one about "Obama is the anti-christ." I wrote a rebuttal and mailed it right back to her and all the people she sent it to. Within minutes I got a note of thanks from one of the other recipients, who said:

"Jack, I started getting your emails a couple of weeks ago. I don't know who you are, but Thank You for this! Well-versed, and correct. And I appreciate seeing the truth for a change in this campaign."

And then a couple of hours later, I got an email back from the woman who sent the "Obama is the anti-Christ" email. She said, "Thank you for the lesson..." Which I thought was interesting. She sounded sincere.

(BTW: The worst thing about the commenting error I've been getting is that it eats the comment. I'm going to have to remember to copy the comment before hitting the "post" button.)

(Oh, look, Rosa Brooks on Rachel Maddow! Woo!)

bjkeefe said...

Best I ever was able to do was before the campaign started. A relative had me on a list, and about a quarter of the mailings he sent out were these treacly religious things, the sort of thing you'd expect to get from a megachurch's gift shop or something. When one of them would annoy me enough, I'd fisk it or otherwise rebut it, and hit reply-all.

I did a scathing job on the "Ben Stein letter" that was making the rounds a while back, and the only thing that happened was that I got taken off the list.

Hate to hear that you lost a comment. If it happens again tomorrow, or whenever you next leave a comment past right now, I'll just switch back to the old mechanism.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, I appreciate the consideration. I'd hate you to have to switch on my account, but I'd be curious whether any of your other IE users are having the same problem. Seems, these days, I'm the only one still on IE...

Also: The comment I lost was on Althouse's blog. First time I tried the new comment box was over there. At first I thought she'd banned me! So then I came over and tried it here and got the same error.

ADDED: Just tried to post this comment from IE, but it failed. Now posting from FF. I've captured the error this time.

Anonymous said...

Here's a screenshot of the error.

Error text: "Your request could not be processed. Please try again."

bjkeefe said...

Thanks for that. Did you try just clicking "Post" again? And if so, did you just keep getting the same error message?

I doubt you're the only IE user out there. Once upon a time I looked at the Google Analytics for this site, and while the percentage of FF users was higher than the overall population, it sure wasn't 100%

I'll leave things as they are now, assuming you want to fiddle around a little more. But let me know as soon as you get bored (with failure). It takes all of ten seconds to switch things back to the old way of commenting, and I'm happy to do it.

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