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Oh Noes! "BarackObama" is following "palinsvagina" on Twitter! Does Michelle Know?

Submitted by lagomorph on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 08:08

Thanks to Sarah Palin, Election 2008 has provided us with a new twist on Class Warfare: Classy vs. Class-Free. Just when I think that the far Left wing of the Democratic Party can't possibly get any more interestingly offensive or entertainingly disturbing, they never disappoint me. For example, today I discovered that Barack Obama is following Sarah Palin's Vagina on Twitter. For those who don't use Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool that allows 140-character updates and links to be sent and received via remote devices as well as your computer, "following" is a voluntary action that an account holder takes to view the posts of other accounts. Twitter posts are called "tweets".

xBHO Following SPV

Apparently National Public Radio is also a big fan of "Sarah Palin's Vagina". Your tax dollars at work!

  xNPR following SPV

And the feeling is mutual, as "Sarah Palin's Vagina" follows the presidential leadership of Barack Obama as well. I guess they call it Team O for a reason.

Take a look at the tweets from an account that goes by the swanky screen name of palinsvagina, and decide for yourself how Presidential you think it is that the account that goes by the name of Barack Obama has decided to follow someone who issues these comments...

BO Following SPV

Ah, the post-feminism of it all. The delicate Sisterhood of Vaginal Politics is hereby in full flower. Can we say "pigs with lipstick"? Why, Yes We Can.

TF following SPV

When I sent several messages to my constituents on Twitter while researching this, I received an interesting reply from one of them, who said "I have to be fair: @BarackObama uses a auto follow script. It's not their fault. It's unreasonable to expect the campaigns do fulltime twitter monitoring."  I think it is reasonable to expect campaigns to monitor their associations with supporters using these tactics.  What are your thoughts?

I suppose any publicity is good publicity, which explains the delight of the author of these posts who left the comment left on my blog with their MySpace and website information. 

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Comments

C'mon... ever hear of Auto-Follow???

Submitted by drdigipol on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 10:32.

The Obama campaign uses auto-follow on Twitter, so anyone who follows the campaign is automatically followed by the campaign.  Your comment that "'following' is a voluntary action" is totally wrong in this case.

With over 86,000 followers, there is no way this is a manually managed program.

In fact, given the auto-follow setting, whoever owns this Sarah Palin twitter account just had to follow Obama to become followed by him.

Let's focus on some real news.

Thanks for 'splaining the technology

Submitted by lagomorph on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 14:53.

According to Twitter's help site:

Auto-follow isn't enabled by default. Twitter users have to request it via the Twitter help form. If you believe Twitter has turned auto-follow on for your account, you can use the same form to request that they disable it.

Thanks to you, today I'm schooled on auto-follow. 

But to address the issue of whether or not this is "real news", I would say it depends on what you consider "real news".  Does this story address the economy?  No.  National Security?  Nope.  But neither does Sarah Palin's email hack.  Does this story address the exploitation of the Internet and social media by political activists to further offensive assaults on Republican candidates?  You bet.

Once again, as with the email hack, we can ask the question "what if someone had reversed the offensive remarks and pointed them toward Michelle or Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden?  Would there be a considerable outcry from the media, the campaign and the supporters?"  Absolutely there would, and we all know it.

If it involved Barack Obama, Republicans would be charged with racism.  If it involved Nancy Pelosi, Republicans would be charged with sexism.  If it involved Joe Biden, Republicans would be charged with just being generally disgusting and offensive.  But since it involves a conservative Republican candidate, hey - no worries, it's all good.  We're fine with it. 

That's just an unacceptable double standard.  Spare me the same old "let's not distract from the real news" bamboozle.  If we didn't have such low standards of ethics, consideration of others, socially acceptable behavior, disrespect for privacy, intolerance, bias, and utterly incomprehensible offensiveness toward people running for public office in this country, we'd have a lot less news of corruption, sex scandals, embezzlement, fraud, and other "soft crimes" that supposedly "don't hurt anyone".  Except these "distractions" do harm us.  They harm us because they erode our culture and our social contract, and lower the bar to a degree that perpetrates a slippery slope of what's acceptable until what is not acceptable is no longer definable because "we shouldn't judge" and "there is no real right or wrong".  We've slipped all the way into moral relativism where absolutely everything is free of boundaries.  We've opened the Pandora's Box and released the hounds.  

Maybe you don't see that as a problem.  It looks like about half the voting population agrees with you, which is their choice, but it's a choice that troubles me.  My values are "live and let live".  What we've seen exposed on the Left are the values of "if you're not like me, if you're Other Than Me, then you deserve to be spit upon verbally, physically, and threatened with gang rape if you disagree with me."  And that troubles me a lot.