Was A RNC Web Site Promoting Anti-Semitic, Anti-Latino, And Pornographic Literature? No.

by John Hawkins | July 17, 2009 12:59 am

At first glance, the folks over at AMERICAblog seemed to have a great scoop[1].

Forget that copy of Playboy, kids, you don’t need to go any further than your local RNC.com Web site. Of course, in all seriousness, it’s far worse than that – the Web site of the Republican National Committee is also promoting literature that is overtly anti-Semitic and anti-Latino.

It all started when earlier this week the GOP started promoting it’s new Web site, http://www.gop.com/obamacard/[2]. The site is supposed to showcase how much money President Obama is supposedly spending by letting you, the visitor, spend money too on your new “Obama credit card.”

Just what products does the RNC propose you buy with your new Obama credit card? Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature – with pictures to boot

Worse yet, this “Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature – with pictures to boot” is designed to help the Young Republicans[3]!

ObamaCard Project

A young republican in the RNC New Media Department created a funky, little game for Young Republicans to borrow and spend like President Obama. Mentioned by New Media Director, Todd Herman in Indiana after Chairman Steele spoke at the Young Republican National Convention in Indianapolis, the Obama spending toy lets Young Republican chapters from around the country compete to see who can reach the $3.4 trillion limit set by our current president.

The New Media team is completely focused on launching the new web platform and infrastructure, but to keep our sanity we let a team member put together this fun little application. Instructions for use can be found here, the application his here, and we hope you enjoy!

Perhaps worst of all, well, at least from a tech junky perspective, the coding on the website was extremely sloppy. I mean, come on, look at these screenshots,

That’s so sloppy that it originally made me think that perhaps this website wasn’t supposed to be live; so I started talking to my contacts. One of them, who definitely is in a place to know exactly what’s going on, spoke to me, but only on background. This person, for good reason, would only allow me to identify him/her as “a source.” Still, my source was able to give me the behind the scenes details on the Obama Card website.

First off, the offensive material? For example, the “Anti-semitic” literature AMERICAblog came up with?

The website has a profanity filter in place that blocks certain words. Otherwise, all it does is pull up a search of that particular word on Amazon.com[4], which no one considers to be a racist or anti-semitic website.

In other words, what you’re seeing is a placebo effect for liberal bloggers. Do a search of a non-racist website, but put “Republican” beside of the website doing the search and they interpret it as,

…overtly anti-Semitic and anti-Latino — AMERICAblog[5]

I’m running out of synonyms for “astonishing”, “offensive”, “despicable”, “bigotry”, “hypocrisy”… — The Political Carnival[6]

It’s like a Rorschach test for the liberal psyche. You see a butterfly, they see Ronald Reagan beating a homeless guy to death with a baby panda.

As to the coding errors, the RNC is, to its credit, moving over to more of an open source platform. My source told me the idea here was to put it up, bugs and all, and then they were going to put out the source code later, to give people a chance to tune it up on the back end.

Of course, now that this has been controversial enough to make it all the way to The Politico[7] in an article entitled, “RNC pulls game selling offensive items,” that’s probably never going to happen.

Instead, the RNC is going to yank the game,

“It’s unfortunate that someone would spend the time, and go to great lengths, to abuse and exploit this website feature that was designed to give taxpayers the opportunity to see if they could spend $3.4 trillion – like President Obama did with his budget. Profanity blockers were included since the site’s launch. However, the website feature has been taken down until additional, stricter search filters have been added.” – Gail Gitcho RNC spokesperson

She’s right, you know. Basically, the story is that a bunch of childlike liberals, most of whom curse like sailors, typed words into a search engine that referenced Amazon and pretended to be shocked and offended by what pulled up. On the outrage scale, that merits about a 3 out of 100.

That being said, it wasn’t the greatest game in the world, it was a mistake to create any sort of game that searches an outside database (because it was destined to lead to exactly this problem) — and open source or not, the basic coding for a page on the GOP’s website should be better done than that. That’s why it was a good idea for the GOP to chalk this one up as a “learning experience” and to pull the game despite the fact that the complaints were extremely overdone.

Hat tip to Dan Riehl at Riehl World View[8] for a piece of information in the story.