In today's issue of Salon, a fine investigative piece about the recently "out-of-the-closet" gay Republican operative Arthur Finkelstein's new website stophernow.com. The article's author Farhad Manjoo is not impressed:
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html
Scroll down the Salon War Room page a bit (you will have to watch an ad for access to the article if you're not a subscriber)
More below.......
Excerpts:
"Arthur Finkelstein, the shadowy Republican political operative who recently set his sights on Hillary Clinton, has just launched his much-hyped Swift Boat-inspired anti-Hillary Web effort, stophernow.com. The site, which aims to "rescue" America from "the radical ideas of Hillary Clinton," takes the low road to political victory: Replete with unflattering pictures and overheated prose ("STOP HER NOW is intent on revealing to the American public the TRUTH about just who Hillary Clinton really is"), its most prominent feature is the "Donate" button, which Finkelstein and his pals hope you will press many, many times. People familiar with Finkelstein's intentions -- the man himself hardly ever talks to the press; he's rarely even photographed, and he has been called the Keyser Soze of politics -- have said that he intends to raise $10 million in order to defeat Hillary's 2006 Senate campaign, thereby dashing her 2008 presidential hopes. "
Mr. Manjoo also finds some rather interesting language hidden in the site's HTML tags:
"...But one War Room reader did alert us to something odd about stophernow.com. The page's "meta tags" -- the text in the source code of a Web page that's designed to let search engines know what the site is about -- includes some language that we thought was quite mysterious. "Stop Her Now is a collaboration of over 7,600 independent Baptist churches in America, who are against the deportation of Jews from Gush Katif in Gaza and Northern Samaria," one meta tag says. Another tag lists several keywords to describe the site: "Israel, Gush Katif, Gaza Strip, Northern Samaria, Jews, settlers, Christian, Baptist, Oklahoma."
At first we had no idea what these tags were doing in a site designed to defeat Hillary Clinton. Finkelstein's sympathy for the Israeli right-wing is well-known; in the past, he's provided campaign advice to Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. But what does Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign have to do with Jews in Gaza? And why is Finkelstein mentioning these topics only in stophernow.com's meta tags, in a way that's hidden from visitors to the site?..."
I apologize for my lack of "formal" formatting. I'll need to take some time to learn how.