October 29th, 2010
The pages of history will show that anti-anti-Palinism was a powerful force in American politics during the late 2000’s. So powerful, in fact, that it spread to encompass politicians who weren’t even Sarah Palin.
In case you missed it, yesterday Gawker published a story (you’ll get no link from me) about a guy who claimed to have hooked up with O’Donnell a few years back on Halloween night. It was an anonymous, first-person account in which the fellow lewdly and uncharitably revealed all sorts of (purported) particulars and O’Donnell and attempted to make her look like a slut/weirdo/harpy/etc. The piece had neither news value, nor entertainment value. It was mean-spirited and ugly in the extreme. Gawker paid for it. (I mean this literally–they gave the cretin “low four figures” to tell this tale; about what they paid for the iPhone 4.)
The story makes this mild Ben McGrath hit piece on Nick Denton look not mean enough by a factor of 1,000.
In the intervening 24 hours, the Village Voice and the Smoking Gun combined to identify the anonymous party, whose name is Dustin Dominiak. May his name live forever in Google so that any woman who ever considers dating him can easily find out exactly what sort of man he is.
Anyway, the entire episode is deeply unpleasant, except for this one graph, from the Village Voice’s account of how they tracked Dustin Dominiak down:
Finally, we got ahold of Ms. Jackson, Christine O’Donnell’s very nice and pleasant-to-talk-to aunt. She had never heard of “the Gawker,” but did have very nice things to say about her niece, and noted what an ugly campaign it was and would tell us on the record that all the nasty things said about her niece were “false.” She also confirmed that Brad and Brent were indeed once tenants, and that she had yet to read the story, but not much else to say. We left our contact information with her and await any further details from her in the event she ends up reading another nasty thing about her niece.
As Allahpundit notes, this story has united much of the lefty blogosphere behind O’Donnell. Which tells you how strong a force anti-anti-Palinism can be. As of today, the RCP average had O’Donnell -18 in her race. I’ll be curious to see if she finishes closer than that.
SkinsFanPG October 29, 2010 at 11:50 am
The Coons lead is now down to 10 points. O’Donnell won’t pull this off, but she’ll finish within 6-7 points, which will serve as a huge embarrassment to both parties: Dems will look pathetic that they couldn’t destroy a lady with tons of baggage and questionable grasp of reality, and Republicans will look stupid for nominating O’Donnell (too late).