Right wing lies are just old hat…

Here’s a little update for anyone who got here by Googling me. I started all this blog business in order to protect a few innocent people who had been wrongly attacked  by predatory blogger Lance Dutson. I was trying to clean up the way  they Googled.

Since Lance Dutson got caught lying and was forced (by his boss Susan Collins?) to remove all that mendacious content, most everything negative about his victims has disappeared.

Now it’s I who will Google as Dudley Do-Right for all of posterity.

That’s what you get for dignifying  webrats.

I  should not have used my real name in regards to any of this. It was light years ago, and America’s inaptly named “Legitimate Press” had picked up the Dutson lies. I sadly got sucked in, and spent many hours contradicting Dutson’s  lies.  I knew his victims, and was new to the world of politics.

It’s Shel Israel’s fault; he’s the one who literally wrote the book on blogging.

You can now buy Israels’ book brand new for under $5.00, but he was all the rage for awhile there. In the book, amidst erstwhile invaluable lore about the “new” medium, lay the admonition always to use your real name online , or else you would not be taken seriously.

Now it’s I who Googles as a nut; who would ever post  using his real name, unless they had an ego problem?  And I did not understood the efficiency of the crawlers. Time does not heal all wounds online.

As it turns out,  dishonest predatory “journalism”, and gullible readers are everywhere.  (Want to buy some Sarah Palin designer eyeglasses?)

It’s long since over now, and only the musty archives of Googledom lend the erroneous impression of relevancy to anyone, save perhaps the most obscure Rush Limbaugh fan.

Lance Dutson, Susan Collins…strange tales

To anyone who has followed this truly bizarre case from day one, the simple truth might seem difficult to fathom. But the following facts are… nothing but the truth.

Very strange.

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It all started in 2005 when Maine blogger and perennially unemployed website developer Lance Dutson inexplicably attacked the Maine Office of Tourism for driving up bid costs on the Google Adword program.

 

This accusation just did not ring true, especially given the undeniably snarky tone in which it was delivered. So I did some checking up, and this is what I learned.
Dutson was completely wrong about Adwords. Yet he claimed to be an SEO (Search Engine Marketing) expert. Did he know he was wrong?

 

Alas, the MOT’s (IMHO clueless) ad agency sued him anyhow, and from that moment on, Dutson was a folk hero, incapable of doing  wrong… at least not as per his easily inflammable “webrat” groupies. Right wing  Mainers assuaged their cabin fever and gratified their Baldacci bashing appetites by taking up the Dutson cause.

 

 

The lawsuit (which was of course quickly dropped) assumedly enraged young Mr Dutson, so he followed all those erroneous Adwords “Pay-per-Gate” charges with still more lies.   In a loud exhibition of paranoia, (or  self aggrandising attention seeking?), Dutson raved that everyone in Augusta was out to get him. He twisted the facts to fit into this “persecuted investigative journalist” image.What a hero!
The trouble is that Dutson was always perfectly aware that his lies were lies, There were several occasions in which he himself admitted that a certain charge was not true. But the next day he would appear to forget these admissions. Lance Dutson maintained the mendacious attack, and on he ranted.
Anyone following the links to the “Proof” that he offered would of course find no proof whatsoever – sometimes the links even disproved his accusations.  But none of his readers bothered to read the links.  They only read his charges, they believed every word, and reacted violently.

 

Rising right wing internet impressario Robert Cox believed  Dutson’s lies without even having read through Dutson’s blog – even after I and several other people informed him about what Dutson was doing.
(Actually, it would appear that Cox  really had no interest whatever in Dutson’s honesty – only in his celebrity.)  Cox adopted Dutson as a “Cause Celèbre” (his own words) and arranged for Dutson to attain yet more exposure… as the first blogger ever to “live blog” a major media event – the Scooter Libby trial.

 

Needless to say, Dutson’s vacuous followers – and even “legitimate” press pundits –  increased tenfold.  His readers just believed every  lie that  he uttered.  I pointed out Dutson’s lies in several comments on his blog, but he deleted every comment I had ever made. Other people who tried to expose the truth received similar treatment by him.
The MOT director (who has been serving “At the Pleasure” for 12 years) was dismissed by Augusta “amid allegations of corruption” . Right wing bloggers crowed. But the truth is that the dismissal was only political, and had nothing to do with the phony charges. The change had been planned long before Dutson entered the scene.

 

Finally, as a reward for his long campaign of lies and false accusations, Dutson was given a $25K position as Susan Collins’ webmaster.
I belatedly learned of the same mendacious sympathy-garnering techniques employed by Susan Collins in 1996 and again just this year. Is that where Dutson learned these sophomoric tactics?

UPDATE- 3/08 : We can safely assume that my latest blogs here are the reason that he has finally removed each and every  lying post about the subjects. Once he hit the “Big” time, he finally got caught. Assumedly,  someone out there  actually took the time to read.