November 15, 2007
The first phase of the smear campaign against Ron Paul was all about “spamming”—sending unsolicited email with pro-Paul messages. This was and is a lot of malarkey, as spammers notoriously glom on to anything that is of current interest and more likely to get the recipient to open the email. Now we have anti-Paul spam, and there’s no question that it’s being sent by the Smear Brigade, as this letter from a reader indicates:
“The other day I found a thing in my inbox from somebody calling themselves GOPUSAEagle, or something like that. It turned out to be links to the originating website, which is devoted to conservative(neocon, I think)-slanted news. There were three links to articles/editorials decrying the “incivility” of Ron Paul supporters, of which I read two. There wasn’t much about Dr. Paul, or anything he advocates, but they went on at length about how rude so many Paul supporters are, and also making the point that he does poorly in “legitimate” polls. Also, significantly—and hypocritically—they rather stridently made the accusation, more than once, about Paul’s supporters “spamming” online polls. My first reaction was to fire off an angry email, then, on further consideration, I sent a more level-toned email.
“I guess I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but after a day or so, I realized what the strategy here was. In the first place, GOPUSAEagle really did spam me —I don’t need to put quotes around that!—by sending me their online newsletter without my invitation (I’d never even heard of them before), and _then_ proceeded to troll me, with those extremely unfair anti-Paul editorials! That was the whole point of the exercise—they would provoke irate replies to their trash articles, some of which would include profanity and rude language, and would then use this material to further make their point about “uncivil” Ron Paul supporters. There may be more to the whole operation, but it was at that point that I decided that I would treat GOPUSAetc. the same way I would any usenet troll: I unsubscribed, without comment.
“The main question I have right now is: how did they get my email address? I can think of several alternatives, the most likely being that I participated in a NewsMax poll on the Republican primaries, and indicated that I was behind Ron Paul.”
