Oh Michael Steele – I can hardly believe you used to be the Lieutenant Governor of my state. Or that your former boss is actually seriously considering another run at the Governorship of my state. All of that aside though, it’s well known that the GOP as a party doesn’t exactly understand or embrace the whole technology thing – these are the folks who don’t understand net neutrality and why it’s important (and just views it as “more regulation,” which they’re unilaterally against) and are quick to bash the “hollywood elite” when it comes to things like climate change or social injustice but ready to take the record industry or the movie industry’s side when it comes to wanting to “remotely disable” people’s computers that may potentially have pirated material on them.

But back to point, good old Michael Steele – now the Chair of the Republican party (who is completely disrespected by his own ranks) has himself a little problem. I’ll let my friend Tana Ganeva, writing for AlterNet, explain what happened:

his week, the RNC tried to make the Internet conservative. It was not a resounding success. Instead, a series of hilarious and fairly predictable misfortunes sent a tiny, animated Michael Steele on a wild ride to a bunch of porn, bondage and Communist websites. Here’s what happened, from Wired:

As part of its new media strategy, the Republican party launched a new site called GOP.am on Monday. It’s a URL shortener designed to make it easy for conservative web surfers to exchange links to web pages.

Pranksters almost immediately began using the service to link to controversial or ironically intended websites, such as the official site of the American Communist Party, a bondage website and a webpage advertising a sex toy in the likeness of Barack Obama. GOP.am apparently started blocking such links at some point Tuesday morning, and the GOP.am homepage was taken offline.

This story was picked up by a number of tech outlets, including some that I’m pretty familiar with, and Wired, whose text is used above. The really entertaining part of this is that it shows that the GOP isn’t just not familiar with basic Web services and technology, but that they don’t think to demo or beta test their own services before they rush to get them out and claim that they’re “all about those interwebs or whatever the young folk call it these days.”

I only wish this had happened during an election cycle, to point out exactly how bad they are, on the whole. There’s a reason why a lot of right-wing news blogs look like they’re straight out of 1994, and there’s a reason Drudge can’t be bothered to make his site look anything like a legitimate news site. (other than the fact that it isn’t)

[ GOP Tech Tragedy Sends Michael Steele on Wild Porn, Bondage, Commie Ride ]
Source: AlterNet