Today I (D-Brooklyn) recieved my first e-mail from GOP chairman Michael Steele who, as we and many, manyothers have noted, sucks bad at his job. What am I doing on Republican mailing lists, you ask? Short answer: I have no fucking clue. But for those of you signed up for the DNC list, just picture that, but red.
Anyway, it was a bit uncanny when I loaded up my RSS reader this morning to find this little gem from Mediaite, detailing the latest in a year-long string of hilarioussnafus on the recently-launched GOP website:
They’ve given it another crack, and launched … GOP.am, a URL shortener. How could that possibly go wrong?
I was barely through “URL shortener” before I decided it’d be funny to use GOP.am to post links to Sarah Palin-themed pornos all over the internet. Turns out the internet already had that idea, and that, my friends, is exactly how this idea could, and was probably destined to, go horribly wrong:
GOP.am provides an excellent tool for anybody to put a GOP-branded frame around any website whose URL is shortened. If you have ever been on the Internet, you know why this is problematic.
Within hours of launch, pranksters at Balloon Juice and Wonkette went wild with the service, using the shortener to put the GOP’s frame around bondage sites and Ku Klux Klan sites, among others.
They took the shortner down, put some filters in there, but apparently some weird content still snuck its way through.
So WTF GOP? We know its these folks doing their Web stuff. Those folks seem pretty square, although I will give them props by saying that GOP site’s design is very classy, a look at their own site (and the tawdry “quotes” from obvious stock images; examples: “We troll the blogosphere for a good debate” alongside an elderly couple with laptops, or “I donate six figures every year to support my causes” next to a guy who looks like he might have made a few of those figures directing pornographic films) suggests a certain lack of prowess with the social interwebs.
Oh well. Maybe next year. In the mean time, look before you leap.
The people who make information for Republicans have no sense whatever.
Today I (D-Brooklyn) recieved my first e-mail from GOP chairman Michael Steele who, as we and many, many others have noted, sucks bad at his job. What am I doing on Republican mailing lists, you ask? Short answer: I have no fucking clue. But for those of you signed up for the DNC list, just picture that, but red.
Anyway, it was a bit uncanny when I loaded up my RSS reader this morning to find this little gem from Mediaite, detailing the latest in a year-long string of hilarious snafus on the recently-launched GOP website:
I was barely through “URL shortener” before I decided it’d be funny to use GOP.am to post links to Sarah Palin-themed pornos all over the internet. Turns out the internet already had that idea, and that, my friends, is exactly how this idea could, and was probably destined to, go horribly wrong:
They took the shortner down, put some filters in there, but apparently some weird content still snuck its way through.
So WTF GOP? We know its these folks doing their Web stuff. Those folks seem pretty square, although I will give them props by saying that GOP site’s design is very classy, a look at their own site (and the tawdry “quotes” from obvious stock images; examples: “We troll the blogosphere for a good debate” alongside an elderly couple with laptops, or “I donate six figures every year to support my causes” next to a guy who looks like he might have made a few of those figures directing pornographic films) suggests a certain lack of prowess with the social interwebs.
Oh well. Maybe next year. In the mean time, look before you leap.
[This article is also available at http://gop.am/rq4J, haw haw haw]