the barack obama campaign site is designed to be like an online community. anyone can come by, create an account and start a blog there. so a guy named brother nathanael kapner sets up an account at barackobama.com and writes an inflamatory post about the jewish lobby. a couple of hours later, the obama campaign notices and deletes the post. but not before the rightwing blogosphere latches onto the post and goes nuts about it.
like all howls what will soon be lost is the howler's actual point. do they believe it reveals obama's actual views? (if so why did the campaign delete the post?) brother kapner is not affiliated with the campaign in any way. he's just a guy who used the open source nature of the obama site to write something there that the campaign publicly disavows. kapner is not even an obama supporter; check out this anti-obama rant that kapner wrote just a few days ago.
it seems pretty obvious that kapner doesn't like obama and put up the post on the obama campaign site just to embarrass him. but obvious stuff like that won't get in the way of the dim lights of right blogistan in the midsts of a good howl. the only real question is whether this idiocy gets picked up by the wider world.
UPDATE: kyle at comments from left field notices that the post was a cut-and-paste job from the anti-semitic site "real jew news" (the same site where kapner's anti-obama rant referenced above is found). (h/t cernig from the comments)
...and apparently the mccain official campaign forum has it's own problems with random people leaving racist comments and other smears--unlike the obama site, the ones on the mccain site haven't been deleted. at least not as of this writing. (via attaturk @ eschaton)
