Okay, I know I've been picking on self-appointed machine loyalty enforcer Gatemouth rather often recently, but his newest offenses do deserve some comment.

The more obvious observation about the flood the man whom Pete Sikora describes as toxic released this weekend is this: if one posts material under a given alias, such as Gatemouth, and then decides to post more or less the same material under a different alias, presumably to have some safe harbor from a powerful United States Senator dissed therein, it's known as sockpuppetry. This is generally frowned upon as dishonest. Further, if one nonetheless essays to do this, it's wise to not use the exact same formatting that characterizes one's usual cut-and-pasted-from-Word-Perfect effluvia, because that's kind of a dead giveaway. One could go further and note that it's also considered bad form, when one obviously would like to remain anonymous, as evidenced by posting under an unacknowledged handle, to publish other people's private emails, email addresses, and phone numbers. That's just not done, in part because it invites spam, but in larger part because it's thuggish.

Going further, there's also a (signed and attributed) piece, which really takes several cakes. The length of this effort provides an effective safeguard against its being read. That said, somewhere in the bog is this:

[I]n New York, the Obama campaign itself has apparently given sanction to an official event where Newell and Squadron will be featured speakers. Spotlighting a candidate running against the State's most powerful Democrat seems a highly innovate, thinking out of the box way of marshalling the party's forces for a unified fall effort; but even if one concedes that Obama owes Newell for the 38% he managed in the 64th, what could he possible owe Danny Squadron? Thanks for an endorsement that came the same day as the one he got from Marty Connor? The mind boggles.

The mind reels, rather, from the toxic cocktail of misinformation, dishonesty and downright ignorance that flows from this paragraph. First of all, Gatemouth would be well served to make, and soon, a public disclaimer as to why exactly he's working so hard to discredit Dan Squadron and, to a lesser extent, Paul Newell. This because your casual reader might not understand that he has a vested interest in these races, which colors his commentary not insignificantly. Again, that would be the honest thing to do.

Going into the substance of it, I'm reminded of one of my own cardinal rules of blogging: if you don't know what the hell you're talking about, shut up. Such as, say, deducing from an event on my.barackobama.com anything about the Obama campaign. That's because my.barackobama.com is the user-generated part of Obama's web site, the part that the campaign has nothing whatsoever to do with. This is not new knowledge, coincidentally, because Fox Noise, the Gatemouth of cable news, made the exact same mistake when it declared that the New Black Panthers were featured as endorsers on Obama's site. As I said, if one lacks basic knowledge of what one is writing about, it's best to not write about it, unless one is impelled by, yes, an unspoken (but well-known) agenda and a casual disregard for honest reporting.

As noted, unless. However, Gatemouth's past history provides all too many clues that these probably won't be the last poorly-researched hit pieces he'll inflict on various and sundry participants in the public debate.

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