The Armstrong Williams payola event prompted a frisson of excitement in the blogosphere this week. By way of minimizing the significance of Mr. Williams' quarter-million dollar ethical "slip," a bevy of concerned citizens from the right immediately went sleuthing to discover similar indiscretions committed by the opposition.
Lo and be hold, it seems that KOS is vulnerable, though not in quite the same way. In dollars and cents, the Dean Campaign's technical consulting amounts look like gratuities to a waiter while the Armstrong Williams take is more like the price of the meal. But that's not the point, don't you know! (Read here with lofty tones of righteous indignation...) It's the principle of the thing!
I don't care to enter the fray, but this morning's usual Sunday morning foray into the NY Times will have to wait because I wasted so much time reading the fallout at atrios and a wonderful, piquant summary at wampum. There are the links, if anybody cares. I don't.
Once again, the rug has been pulled from under a meaningful story by shrewd spinning on the part of the opposition. Unlike prison abuses in Iraq and Cuba (those are just a few bad apples) this one was minimized by the opposite spin (everybody's doing it).
I can't sign off without putting up a Wampum snip...
I offered to help the Clark campaign, and I was going to be making two grand a month, maybe, to make lots of Linux boxen in colo'd facs provide highly reliable content delivery systems -- instances of Mysql or Postgresql and lots of XSL gunk-munging and happy Apache servers presenting a seamless sea of virtual hosts all DNS'd out into a web page, blog and a mailman instance at every precinct captain's mouse click, a scalable content playground for the content people to message and maintain on, and do the cisco IOS work to make a campaign as resilient and multi-homed as a cautious COLO or ISP would want.
But that doesn't seem to be the way of the future for Democratic campaigns. All the money went to the out-sourced address-list outfits for direct mail, or the out-sourced slick-in-the-wrong-direction (even Kucinich's) sorta-like-television website ad firms, or completely divorced from the interactive peer-to-peer model and thrown into the broadcast air, like pixie dust, or plutonium, still circiling the globe since Eisenhower's time, to land glowingly on every pair of rabbit ears or coax jack in targeted media markets.
[...]
The real outrage is that Markos and Jerome didn't make a living wage working for a campaign that hoovered the lint from the pockets of the Deaniacs, and they wouldn't have been any better off working for any of the competing Democratic campaigns.
1 comment:
Seems minor to me, too, but I chose to comment on it briefly, since I had complained about Armstrong Williams. I actually don't care much, either. Issues more than candidates capture my attention these days.
And cooking....:)
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