After the trouble that Peter Ragone got into for posting comments under different names, you’d think Garry South (and his wife) would have learned something. But, alas, in California, sock puppetry is always in season. They developed some sort of tag team in the Open Letter diary. So here’s how it goes. First Garry comes in and says how pathetic I am for having what is essentially a myspace page (I have a real one too), how mean I am, how I have no right to dare question his genius and how I have no right to communicate with my presidential candidates. Whew! Plus I received and offer to do something that I have no desire to do: “Until then, you can kiss my . . . baby.” All that was in this comment.
Yesterday, another comment came down the pike from Garry South, but this one referred to South in the third person, such as this from an excellent introductory paragraph:
I suggest you should be the one to shut your mouth. You simply have not an ounce of political savvy or wisdom to second guess one of the most brilliant political minds of our country.
Over the flip, please…
Whoa, I thought to myself. Did Garry South just call himself “one of the greatest political minds of our country” right after he denied that his ego was a problem. I’m thinking that I might have touched the crazy nerve, you know the nerve that gets you to talk in third person like Bob Dole or something. I didn’t mind the remarks about my crazy rantings and all that jazz, because, you know, I thought I was dealing with some sort of nervous breakdown. And I’m not one to gratuitously respond to the mentally ill.
But, it turns out, that it wasn’t Garry who said that Garry was one of the greatest political minds. Nope this comment reveals that it was, in fact, his wife who wrote that South is “brilliant”. It seems she had planned to post her long rant anonymously, but had failed. Personally, I think that qualifies for sock puppetry, but as always, I’m open for comments on that one. (One thing here for all you people who plan to engage in sock puppetry: I see your IP addresses and I will be highly suspicious if two commentors have the same address.) In her second comment, this time under the user name “truedemocrat”, Mrs. South said that:
Call me biased in my defense of him, but I know many true Democrats will agree with me — if they are honest!
You think, really? No! Nobody would possibly expect his wife to be biased. The problem, for me anyway, isn’t that she posted under Garry’s name (perhaps not knowing that Garry’s name would be on the post), but rather that she thought she could post that comment without mentioning that she was married to the guy.
One more note: I was wrong about Mr. South running Gray Davis’ recall campaign. I apologize about that. In the end, the point of the original diary was only to say that the “netroots” would take the hiring of Garry South as a mark of the DLC. Any observer of the netroots understands that Al From doesn’t have too many friends within this community. If my rhetoric exceeded that notice, I apologize, but I stick to the original premise of the letter: If you hire Garry South, you will be writing off the support of California’s netroots and progressive wing.
