Coakley Vs. Brown Manifests Online In Daily Kos Vs. RedState Rumbles
No one ever said it would be easy. As the Senate race in Massachusetts approaches the zero hour, last minute scrambling has turned ugly — and online. First there was MSNBC’s Ed Schultz possibly encouraging voter fraud, then there was the liberal blogs and their Scott Brown birther video, and it all culminated with the president getting yelled at during a speech for Martha Coakley. Now, two pillars of the political web — Daily Kos and Red State — have declared war.
Early in the weekend, Red State’s Erick Erickson posted the addresses of some Coakley phone banks, encouraging Brown supporters to “go by and laugh.” Daily Kos did not take so kindly to what they perceived as intimidation and sabotage.
One Kos user, pinback, wrote that Red State users were “taking the hint, and in the comments were making various suggestions to show up and disrupt the phone banks.” Some examples were provided:
Jot down there callback number… put it on autodial…
Reminisce about “the good old days”…
Ask about their grandkids and family and ask if they’re voting for coakley… are any of them in the military? Why not? What’s wrong with that…
when they eventually hang up start calling them back on autodial to talk…
Anyone have access to any robocall setups?
just a thought… Off to conventionland again in AM… Good luck up North next Tuesday-don’t forget to be ready to call shenanigans etc…
Post callers numbers so we all can call them back. We can tie them up more!
All in all, some pretty standard online trolling, and with no proof that anyone really took action against Coakley and her supporters. Still, the 260 comments beneath the Daily Kos post about defending Coakley from the phone bank disruptions represent a telling response from a community that felt threatened. Now, in eight follow-up posts on Daily Kos, RedState and Erickson have been challenged, with some even charging that their actions were illegal.
Erickson countered:
The not so very bright readers of Kos want to send Martha Coakley and me to jail.
Why us?
Well, I published the list of union organized phone banks for Coakley on Friday night.
Some genius who probably thinks Joe Stalin was just misunderstood now is convinced I must go to jail. WITH A POLL!!!!
I assume s/he (that covers everything including transgendered I hope) also wants to send Martha Coakley to jail. She did the same thing I did, but offered up even more details, including the phone numbers of the locations and email address of the contact person.
Idiots.
By the way, points off to the Koskidz for misspelling my name.
The entire skirmish does indeed seem petty, in a very obvious way, and yet, the groups’ dedication to a crucial special election is somehow endearing — activism through online media — name-calling and all. And whether it has any effect on getting out the vote in Massachusetts tomorrow, we may never know. But you can be sure that it’s only going to get uglier in the next 36 hours. And whoever comes out on top will make it clear that they had a hand in it. God bless the internet.
