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Charles Johnson of Little Green Fupas (no LGF linkee) discovers a major plot to make Sarah Palin look all homo-happy and sets out to investigate:

Who’s Behind Anti-Palin Smear Site? Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:57:26 am PST

Suddenly appearing among the Google search results for “sarah palin gay,” a web site titled: Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights.

[...]

This sure looks like the work of the dastardly right-wing anti-gay attack machine, doesn’t it?

But look who’s really behind this.

In the Linux console, if you enter the following commands, you can learn the secrets of a political dirty trick. First, look up the host of ‘sarahpalingayrights.com’ to get the site’s IP address.

host sarahpalingayrights.com sarahpalingayrights.com has address 74.208.74.232

Then use the same command to look up the domain name pointer of that IP address.

host 74.208.74.232 232.74.208.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer obamadefense.com

Well, well. “Obamadefense.com,” eh?

And what happens if you enter obamadefense.com on your browser’s address line?

Wait, wait, wait Charles, let me help …

Okay. Go ahead:

Why, you’re redirected to none other than FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama site that’s supposed to be defending him against smears.

Looks like they may have a second purpose: to generate a few smears of their own.

And with a quickness, the 101st Fighting Keyboarders join Charles with  torches a’blazin’ and pitchforks a’thrustin’.

AJ Strata:

Johnson knows is computer and communications systems as do I, so let me translate for those of you who don’t speak network IP geek. Obama’s websites are clustered on dedicated servers in order to handle the massive amount of traffic his site generates. Each server has a Internet Protocol (IP) address. Between his media dumps and the community blog with tens of thousands of posters no server in the Obama suite is doing anything but serving the Obama campaign. Those IP addresses belong to computers for his campaign.

So when Johnson notes that this new smear site is running on a Obama campaign computer resource it is damning and irrefutable evidence the Obama campaign is behind it. The server was probably separated off from the main server suite to host just this trash (and I am sure others). But the techno-neophytes on the Obama campaign don’t realize that an IP address tracks to an owner. Nothing goes on those Obama servers from anywhere else than the Obama Campaign geeks.

In essence, and in actual legal terms, the smear site is hosted on an Obama campaign run computer. They ‘own’ the server and its content. Johnson just caught Obama trying to secretly stab his woman opponent in the back. How is that for equal pay (back).

[...]

Update: Johnson notes at the end of his post that he has not ‘proven’ Obama’s campaign is behind the smears. Yeah, well it depends on your criteria of proof. That is my claim, not his. What CJ has shown is proof enough for an investigation by law enforcement (who won’t be called in on this case in any event). To be fair, Johnson is right – I have not proven the IP addresses are tied to the Obama campaign. But knowing how large sites isolate their servers and SW from other users and their customers (who can bring their sites down with traffic, infect their code with viruses, etc) it is impossible to see a scenario where the IP, and code running on that IP, are not completely under control of the Obama Campaign

.

If the Obama camp wants to prove me wrong – have at it.

JuCo Toynbee:

I’m sure there are plenty more smears flying around the fever swamps of the leftosphere, but its noteworthy that there’s some speculation that even Barack Obama’s official campaign may be behind an attack on Palin claiming that she favors gay marriage.

The Founding Bloggers:

LGF does it again. This time Charles has busted the Obama campaign producing fake websites posing as ultra-conservatives against Palin for supporting gay rights. Is that the kind of change they are talking about??? Disgusting!

Gun Counter Gomer:

This is an interesting find. Charles Johnson does the rundown, showing that Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights and Obamadefense.com share the same IP address of 74.208.74.232.

Copy and paste that into your address bar, and guess where you end up being redirected? Obama campaign Web site, Fight the Smears.

Johnson also notes that other pro-Obama and anti-McCain web sites trace back to the same IP address. Are there IP sleuths out there who can conclusively run down the ownership of these sites?

If Barack Obama’s campaign is associated with these sites (not yet proven by any stretch, I hasten to add), the campaign would seem to be in direct violation of campaign laws.

Are there any campaign law attorneys out there who could speak to this possibility with more authority?

Yeah! Fuck yeah! USA! USA! US–hunh? wha-? Oh. Wait:

UPDATE at 8/30/08 2:16:54 pm:UPDATE at 8/30/08 2:16:54 pm:

There is apparently no connection between these attack sites and the official Obama campaign; to get to the bottom of it I emailed the owner of an associated site, and here’s his reply:

I run ObamaTaxCut.com, or actually alchemytoday.com/obamataxcut

I think the person who registered the domain and forwarded traffic to it also owns/ran ObamaDefense.com — this used to be a separate site with short defenses of various factually inaccurate charges against Obama during the primary, but the owner changed it to redirect to Obama’s site after the campaign made one themselves.

UPDATE at 8/30/08 3:20:31 pm:

One last comment on this: the point still stands that it’s more than a little slimy to be a supporter of the “progressive” campaign of Barack Obama, then turn around and use Sarah Palin’s pro-gay rights positions against her in a creepy anonymous web site (that suddenly turns up highly placed on Google).

And the chastened wingnuts learn their lesson:

The end(?) of the story here seems to be that we were dead wrong jumping to the conclusion that this was a site directly related to the Obama Campaign. It is only indirectly connected by a loose canon supporter of Obama. I’ll keep the title of the post the way it is as a reminder of the perils of jumping the gun.Not an excuse, but just as a way of adding context, it is hard not to think the worst when it comes to Obama’s website.

Because the title:

OBAMA’S DIGITAL BROWNSHIRTS

…is an accurate reflection of what went horribly horribly wrong today in Wingnutistan.