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Free Speech Like it "Spose" to Be
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| By Pat Hartman |
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| The backstory: in 1998, as Texas governor G. W. Bush prepared to run for president, maverick computer programmer Zack Exley bought the domain name gwbush.com. When the candidate's handlers offered to buy the web address, Exley named a ridiculous six-figure price. Or, as Newsweek would have it, he offered to sell it first, and was turned down. Either way, it was in reaction to this website that the soon-to-be president uttered one of his more memorable lines: "There ought to be limits to freedom." |
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The graphically massaged picture of the candidate snorting coke was bad enough, but webmaster Exley put the site to good pro bono use, publishing actual letters from people imprisoned in Texas for violating the state's harsh drug laws. What really chapped the Bush campaign's hide was coping with phone calls from reporters asking about "Amnesty 2000." They had seen a piece of satire on Exley's site and mistaken it for a real press release, and wanted to know more about Bush's proposed program which would release a million prisoners deprived of their freedom because of drug convictions. As if!
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| The website's slogan, "Hypocrisy With Bravado," highlighted the concept that if G.W. Bush had been subjected to the full force of his own laws, he'd be serving 10 to life. The Bush lawyers got on the case and tried to nail Exley with technical violations of campaign finance rules that they themselves routinely scoffed at. |
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Measures were taken on another front. Two months after gwbush.com was established, hoping to prevent further mischief, the Bush campaign bought more than 250 other potentially problematic domain names. If Saturday Night Live didn't do a sketch on the meeting where the candidate's staff brainstormed which domain names they should buy up, a great comedic opportunity was missed. Contemporary journalists revealed four of the pre-empted names, which of course I looked up to see how they fare today.
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bushsux.org - still registered to the Republican National Committee.
bushsucks.com - sort of a placeholder site, with links to anti-Bush resources, among other things
bushblows.com - now redirects to Hated.com, The People's Source for Freedom and Democracy. Its directory introduces a wonderful array of sites about guess who.
bushbites.com - Don't say I never gave you anything, because here's a hot tip: this one is for sale.
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Then I made some educated guesses about what other names those advisory geniuses must have added to the shopping list, and searched for them online. Here's the rundown: |
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gwbushsucks.com - redirects to Hated.com
georgewbushsucks.com - redirects to Hated.com
georgewbushblows.com - redirects to dubyasworld.com which, you will not be surprised to learn, is an anti-Bush site that serves up some hard statistics. For instance, 1.7 million veterans, including some from the Iraq invasion, have no health insurance. By following a link to Café Press, which sells mugs, t-shirts and so on, we learn that in the "anti-Bush" category there are 31,500 designs. What was that expression, shock and awe? I couldn't look at all 31,500 designs of course, but of the ones I saw, my favorite bumper sticker says, "Will somebody please just give him a blow job, so we can get on with the impeachment?" Well, it's between that one and "Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot." But this site offers much, much more: a collection of pointers to the solidest journalism, the most deeply hidden lies, the most horrible secrets. And here's another tip: buy your gas from Citgo, the only company not connected with the Middle East, therefore the only one Bush and his gang don't make money from.
gwbush.info - links point to articles on other sites, such as Truthout, which reports this finding from the General Accounting Office: in a three-year period, the Bush administration has paid more than $1.6 billion to advertising and public relations firms. Imagine that. Over a billion and a half dollars worth of propaganda, directed at us. This money comes from taxes, and it isn't being spent on programs for our good, but on b.s. cooked up to convince us how good things are, and what a glorious little war we've got. Why is the president's ideological goon squad allowed to spend even a penny on spinmeisters whose mission is to brainwash us?
dubyasucks.info - recently registered to an individual in Great Britain
bushissatan.com - redirects to MoveOn.org, probably thanks to Zack Exley, who went on to be organizing director of that worthy group. He also picked up some of his activist chops from the Ruckus Society, and more recently got involved with a company that helps non-profit groups mobilize support. Then there's the New Organizing Institute, which just held its first grassroots training program a couple of months ago. Nonprofits learn to connect with what Exley calls the netroots, "the hundreds of thousands of online communities thriving on blogs, forums, and other sites…. the Internet's most important contribution to democracy."
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Of the unflattering possibilities I thought of, several are registered to companies which deal in domain names, so are presumably for sale. Among these are |
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Two are definitely for sale:
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Of the other potential domain names I checked on, at least 35 could be yours or mine if we wanted them, because they're currently not registered to anyone at all |
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Zack Exley's original site, gwbush.com, is still around. Today it takes you to stickergiant.com for more subversive merchandise, adorned with such sentiments as: |
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"Regime change" starts at home
One person one vote *may not apply in some states
Stop World War W
If you can read this you're not the president
Bush and Sons, Inc. formerly the United States of America
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| Apparently, most of the 250-odd domain names bought up to protect G. W. Bush have been let slide, their registrations not renewed. In some cases they have actually become what the Bush staffers feared. What happened here? In all the rush and excitement of creating a war, did somebody just forget to send in the renewal check? Or maybe, once the Commander-in-Thief was in, they got cocky and figured it doesn't matter what kind of satire shows up online, since all the dissidents will soon be in concentration camps anyway. Their man is positioned to declare martial law, void the Constitution, and elect himself President for Life. |
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Or maybe they just figured out that suppression is useless. The thing is, a person who looks up something up doesn't necessarily search by domain name. For instance, feeding "bush sux" into Google, you get more than 70,000 returns. With the conventional spelling, you get closer to 400,000 returns. Now there's even a Bush Sucks web ring, something that can't be bought up like a domain name. Who knew? Somewhere along the line, somebody recognized the ultimate futility of buying internet addresses, and turned their attention to figuring out how to squelch all those other embarrassing mentions. Blog licenses will be the least of it. "There ought to be limits to freedom," said the man who has been called the worst president ever, and thanks to him and the most corrupt administration ever, we're only beginning to find out how narrow those limits can be.
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The time to save the Internet is TODAY. http://civic.moveon.org/save_the_internet/
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