neorants

So I just stumbled across "The Official Kerry-Edwards Blog", courtesty of one of the several dozen links from one of my many frighteningly left-wing coworkers, and noticed that it runs on Movable Type. Perhaps I made the wrong decision in weblogging software. Would I really switch software based on who else is using it? Of course not, but there is something else about this site that bothers me…

I was initially very surprised at the inclusion of comment links in the various blog postings, figuring that it would be big trouble for a candidate to open up a forum for political debate. In fact, I honestly expected to open up a comments link and view all sorts of opposing viewpoints.

What did I see? A bunch of people saying, though with more words and much more self-importance, “We love you, John Kerry,” and “George Bush sucks!” After a brief attempt at posting a test comment to check things out, it turns out that blog comments are limited to those who are registered campaign volunteers. Fair enough — their site, their rules.

However, I would expect that any forum allowing blatant misinformation to be propagated would be relegated to independently-run discussion boards. Out-of-context quotes directly from scenes in Fahrenheit 911, using a speech in which the candidate intentionally made fun of himself by calling the rich people his "base" and then drawing a comparison to a literal translation of Al Qaeda, which means "the base"? Come on, you’d better get better source material than that pseudo-documentary drivel. It seems to me that the Kerry campaign is using the comments section to allow misinformation to propagate on an official site but claim no responsibility for the content. Clever? Sure. But not very cool.