August 24, 2006

Politics Vermont continued bending over backwards Thursday in an effort to discredit my assertions that they are a phony, ever-so-subtle propaganda site owned by Tarrant. Again today they have featured a story about Sanders that includes a large picture-link to a Bernie campaign website.

This is a good thing, in a way. They would never have done it, had I not pointed out the differences in the way they linked to the two candidates websites in "A Tale of Two Stories" at BP. Now that they have shut down their comments, they are using the time to go out of their way to be slightly kinder to Sanders in order to prove my assertions false.

I have to hand it to them. They know how to play the game. And they have come up with a strategy they believe will take me out of it. For at least the next week, while their comments are down and probably until labor day, they will strive to seem really really fair and balanced, even to the point of appearing to favor Sanders. At the same time, they will keep sending those silly anonymous comments to BurlingtonPol calling me ‘obsessed,’ telling me to "give it a rest" and so on. They’ll do it on other sites too. PolVT’s "Doodle" created a character named "Mike" over at GMD, that tried to get me to stand down in this way.

In general election politics, Labor day is usually when you go negative if you’re behind. Tarrant started a little early, but bear in mind he’s has yet to go nuclear, so he thought he’d soften us up first with what we now know as regular, bottom of the barrel sleaze tactics, like associating his opponent with terrorists, child molesters and drug dealers. Lions and tigers and bears? This year it’s dealers, molesters and terror (Oh my!). I hate to break it to our friend John Odum, but although the guy in the chicken suit betrays the hypocrisy of a man touting "civility" and "statesmanship," it hardly qualifies as "nuclear." That’s not coming until after Labor Day. Gird yourself for it. Remember what you really believe in.

So PolVT knows it’s got a little time to play with. They don’t have to subtly start tacking back to slanting Tarrant’s way for a week to ten days. They hope by then I’ll have given up, or at least appear to most like a candidate for a tinfoil hat. Like I said, these guys are good. That’s why Tarrant pays them the big bucks.

My ace in the hole is their anonymity, which is virtually impossible to crack through blogger.com, their medium of choice. Get this from their first post after the supposed laptop theft:

"…We should be back up and running very soon. We were thinking about making a jump to Wordpress but after some discussion, we felt that Blogger was a good place to be."

Of course blogger is a "good place to be." Wordpress costs money and thus leaves some trail to the blog owners. They saw what happened to "Jason" at vermontsenaterace, and they won’t go there. There are no accidents.

So why is their anonymity my ace in the whole? Because a real person is more credible than some invisible joker hiding behind a fake name. They could end this anytime by coming out to a trustworthy reporter who agrees to keep their secret. If Freyne or Totten were to report that they knew who the dedgovs were, and knew they didn’t work for Tarrant, I’d drop this tomorrow. Of course that could only be verified if the people who came out could describe in detail a PolVT story before it posted, but I’m sure Totten and Freyne know how to do their jobs.

I won’t bother to give a full analysis of the latest backwards crab-walk from PolVT titled "Sanders Responds to Tarrant in Ad," but I will say, despite the bigger link, I’d feel more personal satisfaction if I could get them to characterize some of Tarrant’s attacks as "attacks," rather than as "focus" or "criticism" but they may be bound by contract not to do that. We’ll see.