Battles Of the backroom bloggers

American Politics has just reached a new level of dirty tricks and disinformation, a new plan of political manipulation that reaches into the very computer that you are reading this from. From the land that gave us the attack ad, we now hear word of the Google Bomb.

A well timed and well placed negative link to a targeted candidate, designed to give a would be voter looking for information on a candidate, the worst possible impression possible.

It’s so devious you would have thought that Karl Rove came up with it, but nope, it’s a Democratic blogger’s invention. Launched on Sunday, it has been used to go after select Republican candidates that have rubbed Democrat bloggers the wrong way. Like a flaming war between teens on MSN gone out of control, Democratic bloggers are snapping those keys and hypertext links on a Holy mission of subterfuge.

Not to be outdone, the Republican’s while late to the Google bomb party, have begun their own late October offensive, aligning their forces to get the maximum boom for their googling bucks.

While the bloggers out bid each other for Google ad placement and navigate the links for negative stories, the real back room people suggest that they’re probably wasting their time. No doubt pining for the days of the nasty attack ads or the smear campaign flyers of old, the old hands shake their heads at the time consuming amount of time that the blogging class is dedicating to the goal of digital destruction.

In fact, the new kids on the dirty tricks block just aren’t getting the props they probably thought that they would.

Some of the big thinkers in the Democrats new media department think that the idea of spending this much time trying to sway 1 % of a voting block to go one way or another, isn’t the best use of resources. Not to mention that they probably are only attempting to do what already happens anyways.

Using Republican Virginia Senator George Allen as an example, a scan of the google results for his name after his controversial remarks over race a few weeks ago, found that negative impressions rose to the top of the list anyways. This before the Google bombing strategy was conceived by those Democrat bloggers with apparently too much time on their hands.

As for Google they’re not particularly fond of the idea as well, claiming that anything that goes against the integrity of their brand isn’t something they wish to see. They also point out that the google algorithm is so complex, they sort of doubt that the google bombing runs will really have much success.

As for the bloggers it’s still all systems go. As both Democrats and Republicans, giddy in the belief that they are out to destroy each other, prove that too much time on the computer really is bad for your outlook on life.

From Rock the Vote, to Google the Vote, it’s a whole new era in those smoky backrooms.