I checked my RRS feeds from blogs I follow this evening and noted an article titled Debate Feed on Right Voices. Thinking they had scored a ‘live as it happens’ feed for the presidential debates I scooted over to check it out and found a link to the George W. Bush site that contained the following

Track the debates on your personal Web site or blog with a Live Debate Facts feed from Bush-Cheney ‘04. Each time John Kerry says something false or inaccurate during the debates, the live feed will be updated instantly with the facts.

The debate feed is available in two sizes that fit easily into your web site or blog. Just copy and paste a single line of code to your site, and your readers will be updated instantly with breaking debate facts.

I’m not kidding, they got some cut-n-paste code people can put on their blogs that supposedly does this, if you don’t believe me follow the links and check it out.

Within 3 minutes of my asking

Just out of curiosity…. what’s it gonna do when Bush says something that is inaccurate or false?

The answer came back from one of their (I think) regulars…

that wouldn’t happen, stageleft!!! hey all, bush is on dr. phil right now…while i don’t like dr. phil, i do like watching an hour of the bush family!!!

That won’t happen? George W. Bush is not going to say a single solitary thing that is inaccurate or false? All 100% truth, all the time? Yeah right. There are no politicians, especially at that level, who do that - - NONE - - the chances of Bush doing it? Less than that.

Those that think that Bush, or any other politician, isn’t going to stretch the truth, flirt with lies, or lead people down the garden path with “a bit o’ the ‘ole spin” need some serious help…. all that aside, the idea of insta-blog-bush-propaganda appearing on potentially thousands of blogs all at the same time is a pretty wild and significant use of technology - in that respect they are to be applauded for their initiative.

This scheme also shows just exactly how much of an impact blogs have in the role of information dissemination and affecting public opinion these days, if they didn’t think it would cover a lot of ground they wouldn’t bother.

(The content of this post was cut ‘n pasted from the text file containing what was recovered from our previous system after our previous host mangled the database - comments, if any, were not recovered)