Standard Mischief

I was writing yesterday morning when I noticed Snowflakes in Hell and SayUncle scooped me, although I was going at this from another angle. Still, I had my two cents to offer so I dropped a quick comment, and I’d like to expand this a bit here.

The weekend the Zumbo incident came out, much muck was shouted about how much damage Zumbo the clueless had done to us pro-freedom RKBA people. Out of nowhere, it seems that the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership decide to have a Myspace presence, and on that new MySpace page, they decided to run with the Zumbo angle in the worst possible way. In addition, they stuck in a jab about banning scopes. (this is all from memory, as I did not cache the page.)

I saw the page, and immediately said “fake” and moved on, but others took it at face value. Here’s the very first message that mentioned the MySpace page, posted over on Jim Zumbo’s defunct blog:

THE BRADYS ARE ALREADY USING THIS

THE BRADYS ARE ALREADY USING THIS

THE BRADYS ARE ALREADY USING THIS

THE BRADYS ARE ALREADY USING THIS

www.myspace.com/bradycampaign

Check their official myspace, the newest blog post is about this
assclown.

Posted by: Joe Milkor | February 18, 2007 at 04:44 PM

At roughly the same time over at AR15.com, jnewson posted the first mention to the MySpace page (Posted :: 2/18/2007 4:58:10 PM). It’s thirty pages in to the zumbo thread:

http://ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=1&f=5&t=548211&page=30

I can’t be 100% sure which came first without some knowledge of the local clocks each server uses.

If you head over there to the Brady MySpace page now, however, you’ll find this embedded in the page (go to page, hit Ctrl-U)

<a href=”http://www.stopthenra.com” target=”new”><img src=”http://www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/myspace/images/stoptheNRAcom.jpg” border=”0″/></a><br />

Which means, that both the MySpace page is pulling content from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership’s main page, and the Brady Bunch is letting them (note the xshare/myspace/images subdirectory). It’s also noteworthy to mention that now that there’s a graphic from the Brady’s main page, they can use this as a hit counter, and get some stats on their visitors.

If you read the “new and improved” version of the MySpace Brady page carefully, you will also note that every single mention of Zumbo has been taken off the page, and there are a few extra posts added, backdated before this past weekend, when the page was created.

Weighing all that data, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

The initial Brady MySpace was fake, or at least contained content not blessed by the Brady Bunch (tangently related, intern, etc)

If it was fake before, it’s clearly not fake now.

The poster of the original comment on Zumbo’s blog, may actually be from the creator of the myspace page. (I’d love to have that poster’s IP address) Note the reference to the “official myspace” page, looks a little astroturf-ish to me.

Whoever created the MySpace page may actually be a RKBA friendly, and may have done it solely to brew up a shitstorm. In this endeavor whomever was quite effective.

No one over at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership wants to push the Zumbo story. This also seems to include the usual suspects like the GunGuys. (Updated to add: At least not yet, let’s see what happens after this goes mainstream. Below, I’ve noted that the WaPo are on this story with the usual smear)

Besides announcing that the NRA’s rag isn’t gonna buy any more stories from Jim Zumbo, the NRA isn’t willing to bring up the story either.

It takes a week until the Zumbo story breaks into the mainstream national news. Before this Saturday, the only stories were in “outdoors” type columns or in feeds to the outdoors industry.

Update, and only tangently related: Now that the WaPo has made this mainstream, the useful idiots that only get their info from the newspaper and fail to do any original research are blogging. Via Technorati linkback I give you The Living Room in Rogers Park, and Beer Can Politics. Expect the typical drivel.