Sometimes rumors and lies get spread organically with no need from direction. But sometimes what may seem to be an organic bottom up grassroots movement, may actually be led from the top and may be professionally organized.
Rusty connected the dots in a Palin smear campaign, and those dots appear to point to the Obama campaign.
Using techniques that we've used in the past to find the identity of online terrorist supporters, the Jawa team went to work trying to figure out who was behind what appeared, in our opinion, to be a professionally orchestrated smear campaign aimed at Sarah Palin with the ultimate goal of electing Barack Obama.
Here is the smear video that is the subject of Rusty's report. Rusty was suspicious at how quickly the video had gone viral. He also recognized the voice as a professional used by Axelrod in the past. The quality of the supposed amateur video was another flag.
Daily Kos is the blog that really launched Obama's successful campaign. DailyKos diarist "geekesque" tells his audience of a plan to get this and other smear videos to go viral. And I mean just that: he admits that the video and others like it make false claims, but that the ends justify the means.
Rusty has added to his initial post with updates, such as the DailyKos link above, and the disappearance of the original YouTube account, a Facebook account, etc.
Great job, Rusty! Stay on your toes - we suspect to see more of this in the coming weeks!
UPDATE - 3:30pm: The Weekly Standard has picked up the story.
