I had previously posted a couple of times that Conservative bloggers were jumping on the rumor that David Kernell was complicit in the email hacking of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account (remember that?). While the investigation continues, I don’t have much of an opinion of whether or not the kid did it. There’s nothing but rumors on the blogosphere alluding to that, but the point is that right blogs have pounced on him like he was a disciple of Bin Laden, pinning the whole thing on him while ignoring all the facts.

Now they’ve put their sites on another Democrat who decided to put up an anti-Palin video on Youtube raising questions about her connections to the Alaskan Independance Party, which more or less has Alaska’s foot half out the door of being a State in the Union. Maybe it’s a north east thing, but doesn’t anyone else get reminded of whining Montrealers complaining about being a part of Canada?

In short, the guy who uploaded the video (Ethan Winner, going under the top secret conspiracy sounding Youtube name of eswinner), which quickly garnered the attention of some blogs. They found out who he was and outed him, posting personal details which eventually resulted in threatening phone calls and emails to his family. Rather than face the annoyance of being harrassed by a bunch of twitchy Republicans, he decided to take the video down. This only encouraged the bloggers to consider that an attempt to “cover up” some imaginary smoking gun evidence, causing them to blog even more about it. He got fed up and posted a statement to the blog that was causing the most trouble about why he took the video down, which was then dissected and rejected by the bloggers in an oddly McCarthy-like fashion.

In the hours that it took for the video to get posted, blogged about and subsequently taken down, the right has concocted a rather incredible conspiracy theory attempting to link the whole thing to David Axelrod and the Obama campaign.

This has led me to some observations about the conservative blogging world which I’d like to share…

- Conservative Bloggers are more paranoid of a conspiracy than Progressive Bloggers are of the opposing notion. I have never seen people so quick to use faulty information to try and weave together some theory with the sole purpose of connecting it to the Obama campaign, and it’s been done a couple of times in the few days I’ve actually been following them. They must be feeling the desperation big time because they look like they are playing on tilt, to borrow an analogy from poker.

- Conservative Bloggers are quick to arrive at conclusions when their facts don’t come close to supporting it. “David Kernell Did It” , “Obama Campaign Busted On Smear Campaign” , neither of these statements is true when looking at the facts of either situation, but because there is enough suspicion and tenuous circumstancial evidence, they have no problem with “filling in the gaps” of reality to support their claims. They will even boldly blog about it, at the risk of being demolished by a more diligent investigator of the facts, which leads me to believe that their readership also lacks the desire or ability to separate fact from fiction, because they appear rather cavalier in their elasticity of truth.

- Conservative Bloggers will read something once, and run with it as fact. This has been no more obvious than with the David Kernell situation. The kid ended up being the “OJ Simpson” of this case simply because someone had posted on a blog that his email address was linked to the hacker’s confession on 4chan. People began not only accepting this as truth (which it is not, the hacker could have entered any email address, including someone he wanted to set up, like a 20 year old kid from UT), but the bloggers even began to flat out say he did it and used the forementioned statement as their “proof” and run with it.

Another example in the Youtube incident involved someone mentioning the lady in the voiceover sounded like the voice in official Obama ads. Several blogs ran with this as if it were the same person (”This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod’s firm”) which they are now finally starting to ponder that it might be someone else.

I suppose that conservatives are relatively new to the world of blogging, so they sometimes forget that the internet is not the real world. It’s up to each of us to exercise good judgement in taking something as fact, especially if you are putting yourself on the line by publishing your thoughts about it.

Not quite sure what else to make of it. Do these people also believe Obama is a Muslim because they got an Email forward about it? What if someone on their blogroll blogged about it? How do these people discern the truth, and isn’t it a little embarrassing to have to backpeddle when they’re proven wrong?

In a time where Republicans have not only proven that their policies are more socialist than Democrats, but also with the massive lying and corruption being shown from McCain campaign apparently leaving the right vacant in the values which they supposedly are supposed to champion, it just goes to show that when there’s nothing left to re-enforce your notion of reality, even the tiniest things end up looking like big things. These sorts of witch hunts are obviously desperate cries to validate their virtues by proxy, to assume the notion that when you can put your opposition into a negative light, you logically can fool yourself into putting yourself into a positive one by way of deductive logic. I wish them the best of luck.

UPDATE: I think it’s funny that blogging about conservatives yields Google Ads for personality disorder medication.

UPDATE II: Marc Ambinder shared the same thoughts today.

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