This entry was posted on
Monday, October 8th, 2007 at
9:09 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Man, that is a *lot* of effort for a little biscuit, when a simple post or email would have settled it, but I guess Paul Staines has seen better days and Phil “I have no reputation” Hendren is still busy making a name for himself. And it’s no surprise at all that the lead blogger circle-jerker Iain Dale is pitching in.

It creates a compelling illusion for the witless though, and you can see Paul Staines reinforcing that illusion here. By needlessly going all-out on Tom Watson, they seek to convince others that Tom would not have acted honourably (or at all) otherwise.

But, to be fair, these three are notorious for never admitting when they’re wrong, unless a fellow Tory is involved… so perhaps they’re merely projecting their values onto Tom here. I’ve certainly seen that in the case of another member of their team, Praguetory; he’s a serial retro-moderator and a total control freak when it comes to comments, but he’s claimed a moral authority over Tom Watson ever since a concerted spam attack on Tom’s comments function meant that some of his comments fell by the wayside (in Dominic Fisher’s mind, they were censored).

[Meanwhile, not one of these three bloggers has mentioned the name Philip Clarke, which I find curious (see: misleading attacks on Bob Piper).]

Staines, Hendren and Dale like to scream ‘”Obsession!” (or have a sock-puppet do it for them) if anyone presses them for an answer a third or fourth time or takes any effective steps around their comment control-freakery… but they themselves seem obsessed with taking down any bloggers on the left who are more senior to them. Perhaps it has something to do with sustaining Iain Dale’s slowly-coagulating ‘the Tories were here first’ narrative.

It bears mentioning at this point that these three have yet to out-grow Blogspot, and it’s been less than a year since two of them decided to make more than minimal use of a domain name. Dale, the so-called blogging ‘expert’, has yet to make the move.

[For the record: Webcameron was a sham and remains a sham. And very few videos on Webcameron out-perform this single video that shows what a sham it is…. even after a year and a shipload of cash and effort.]

UPDATE – How silly of me… I almost forgot to mention that David Cameron is *still* pretending to operate without the aid of a script and, like most frauds, he’s getting bolder over time.