… and depressing parts of October, too.  Meet Willmoore Kendall, the den Beste who was not there.  In brazen disregard of ratfucking etiquette (a gentleman never tells), I will pull back the curtain on this black op so that you, Gentle Reader, might see what sorts of horrors are possible.  So go on, have a look.  Personal reflections:

  • The high point: probably having my insane suggestion that Joe Biden was not upset by the death of his wife and child picked up by the wingnut blog Flopping Aces.  In their defense: I was selling it pretty hard.  In not their defense: how insane it is, and also everything.
  • The low point: having Jonah Goldberg not print my mostly glowing review of Liberal Fascism, despite the fact that I emailed it to him and name-checked a bunch of smarter right-wing intellectuals who I also pretended to have read.   Which brings us too:
  • The depressing points, comprising all the other points: realizing that there is no amount of crazy crap you can say which is crazier than what your average wingnut is prepared to believe.  Consider, for example, this quite wacky “story the MSM won’t tell you,” weaving together in a glorious tapestry Barack Obama’s terrorist financiers, his secret mistress, ACORN, teh ghey, Saul Alinksy, the Marxist Illuminati who run the world, and liberal media conspiracy cover-ups.  (A tapestry made entirely out of the whole cloth found at the Sean Hannity message boards, if you’re wondering.)  The response to this masterpiece: everybody jumps on the big scoop from 419ScamNews.myspace.com that Michelle Obama totally admitted that Barack is a pan-Africanist Manchurian candidate with a fake birth certificate and a crazy wife.  Perhaps I will have more success with my new enterprise, Newcastle Coal Importation, Ltd.
  • Is that CAPS ROCK, man?  WELL TURN IT UP, MAN!!  CAPS LOCK is cruise control for credibility.

The good news from this failure and waste is that wingnuts seem keen to do make every doomed romantic gesture I’d hope they might, from worshipping Lobotomized Paris Hilton to literally taking the birth certificate shit to the Supreme Fucking Court.  I guess I could encourage them to call the editors of API as expert witnesses, but, really, what is left to do?  It’s a rodentine gang bang up in this piece, son.

Lessons learned:

1. It is financially cheaper than running your own paid media mini-campaign, although it will cost you time and slivers of your soul.  I guess it depends how you value these things; my landlady, for example, takes cash.

2. It is less soul-destroying than phone banking, in my opinion, although my own aversion to the telephone, strangers, and human contact generally must be factored in to this assessment.  It’s usefulness is probably less measurable, although my suspicion is that sowing discontent and craziness in wingnuttia does more good than street demonstrations, or the other avenues of activism open to folks of limited resources.  And it may yield lulz.

3. I can’t recommend the purity troll/instigator persona, as the market is flooded, but the world needs concern trolls.  Also: doctors.  Plans borne of desperation tend not to be the soundest, so spending time online as a cross between Jane Goodall and Lori Drew may just be a fucking stupid idea.  I don’t know.  Doowutchyalike.