Down The Memory Hole
The big (and probably wrong, in my opinion) story of the day, that the Taliban tried to assassinate Vice President Cheney gathered a lot of typically hateful commentary from the left. Mostly it lamented that the attack had missed. But the full-blown moonbattery at the Huffington Post has been expunged, erased, memory-holed. Apparently, the normal hate-filled screeching over there went a bit over the top with the sanctioning of someone claiming to have tried to kill the man who happens to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency of the United States.
Over the last few hours, the more than 400 comments appended to the Huffington Post’s news item on the attack in Afghanistan on a base being visited by Vice-President Dick Cheney have been expunged from the site. At first the comments were closed, then gradually shrunken and for a short time completely expunged from The Huffington Post as the heat on the Cheney hate fest built up over the day.
But the internet is forever once something is published. Oh darn. The HuffinPuff has ambitions to become a big player in the new media. Their sycophants are not helping at the moment.
UPDATE: Others: Blogs of War, Hugh Hewitt, Right Wing Nut House, The Strata-Sphere, Protein Wisdom, Neocon Express, Little Green Footballs, The Indepundit, Texas Rainmaker, A Blog For All, The Radio Equalizer, Hot Air, Captain's Quarters, Webloggin, Daimnation!, The Political Pit Bull, Wizbang, Riehl World View, Jules Crittenden,
Insanity, Left Wing, World news | Gaius February 27, 2007
By TC@LeatherPenguin, February 27, 2007 @ 11:24 pm
you gotta love Zsa-Zsa’s House of Preening Moonbats.
By Quilly Mammoth, February 28, 2007 @ 1:15 am
It was amazing. I blogged about it early this morning and by the time I got to work _all_ of the most offensive posts had been scrubbed. That’ll teach me not to take screenshots of DU.
By Gayle Miller, February 28, 2007 @ 8:32 am
They were probably expunged because many of those comments veered WAY over the line into outright threatening the life of the Vice President or calling for his assassination which is a Federal crime – Ariana wouldn’t look good in prison garb!
By mrgone, February 28, 2007 @ 10:12 am
Sort of like what happens on this site to me about 50% of the time – BTW, it’s not for profanity or abusive language. Mainly for opinions you don’t like.
By Chris, March 1, 2007 @ 6:24 am
So, mrgone, by your logic, when the administrator of this site fails to post your opinions here, he is revising history, even though I am virtually certain that said opinions were never displayed at all.
Whereas the Huffington Post is not, because they removed the comments after others had seen them, and objected to their content, presumably after they had passed through some type of oversight.
Got it.
By cfaller96, March 1, 2007 @ 3:04 pm
Just to nitpick, Chris, but Gaius will pull comments down after they’ve been posted. It’s been done to me a couple times. Not complaining, it’s his blog, but I’m just sayin’.
WRT to HuffPo, I don’t think I understand Gaius’ point. Is he claiming that HuffPo sanctions those comments, by…by…pulling those comments down?!? I just plain don’t understand that- how does pulling a comment down indicate that HuffPo condones that comment?
Or is his point that nutjobs/idiots/sleazeballs exist on the fringe of the left side of the political spectrum, capable of spewing hateful rhetoric? I’ll gladly stipulate that, provided we all stipulate that they exist across the entire political spectrum (LGF comments, anyone?).
Now, can we move to more constructive discussions, like how to ensure proper support for the troops at Walter Reed and other military hospitals? Did I miss Gaius’ post about this?
By Chris, March 2, 2007 @ 6:39 am
Gaius can pull comments whenever he wants. This is his space. If we were having a discussion, when I didn’t want to continue, I would walk away. If I didn’t like what you said, for whatever reason, I could try to forget you ever said it. The same applies to the HuffPo.
The point here is that the HuffPo pulled those comments only after people started noticing them, and commenting about their nature. They seem to have been embarrassed about them, not for their existence, but for people having noticed their existence. It’s like me leaving porn all over the house, and only hiding of it after people start talking about my porn problem.
By cfaller96, March 2, 2007 @ 11:06 am
Is that really true, though? You assign a lot of motivation to HuffPo based on…what, exactly? That they didn’t take down the posts quickly enough? It’s a valid criticism, I suppose, but I don’t think it’s anything to get righteous about.
Look, HuffPo’s a mess. I stopped commenting (and for that matter, visiting) at HuffPo because their commenting software “engine” and policy was at best inconsistent and inscrutable and at worst arbitrary and stupid. I hit the wall when a HuffPo administrator was sock-puppeting, which resulted in HuffPo kicking off a guest commenter that exposed it, yada yada yada and, well…that place is a mess, IMO, but I don’t think that means that the Admins at HuffPo or Arianna herself agreed with the comments.
They screwed up by not taking those comments down or (if possible) blocking those comments before they went up. It’s still quite plausible that something nefarious happened at HuffPo, but I’ll take a wait-and-see approach on that. Sometimes a screwup is just that, and to assume the screwup was deliberate is a stretch.