A lot of comments like these were directed towards anyone expressing skepticism on the GMO proposition. Maybe you should wait a week before mocking Fox for doing the same thing.

Back it he early aughts the Ad agency I worked for merged with a PR firm that was attempting to be a "seeding" pioneer for influencing public opinion on various political topics on these new fangled Blogs.

Pretty quickly most, if not ALL their clients, were corporations attempting to undermine public policies from wetlands restoration to climate change.

I suppose this is what they morphed into.

Roger Ailes has become the interwebs Elmer Fudd.

Reverberating babble really doesn't matter very much in the long run.

Sounds like a fun circle jerk if you're into blogging about bloggers who blog about bloggers. All style, no substance.

or what 4 Phoebe said - enjoying the waste of time this morning on Slog, Miss Wallingford? Spendid here in dnt trust me land.

@7

cute. Have you and Phoebe thought of going on a date? What was that park in NE Cap Hill that Frizelle held the outdoor reading party? German giving the Sausage to Phoebe in the back of his Ford Escort, while sexting one another! HOT!

It never ceases to amaze me to see this strength of this idea that the only thing government does is provide welfare to layabouts.

This is really the only arrow in their quiver -- "wel.fare pi.mp in the WH". It's a kind of resentment that's even stronger than more generic "socialism!" and much, much stronger than the abiding presence of Jeebus (who was, himself, considerably more concerned with aiding the poor than any American politician ever has been).

We've seen it here -- it's Seattleblues's biggest drum by far. James Fallows at the Atlantic just posted a mountain of correspondence with his own personal Randian True Believer. Romney's calumny about "the 47%" was directed at this audience.

This resentment, this overriding conviction that The Brave And Lonely White Man is working his butt off while the politicians take everything from him and give it to the shiftless poors, is where it's at. There is no other idea.

The fact that it's not true, the fact that welfare programs are a tiny proportion of government spending and that most "welfare recipients" are the grandmothers and children of these same terrified white men, or soldiers, or seriously ill people, or EVEN THESE VERY SELF-SAME WHITE MEN, isn't important (facts never are).

But they'll never stop believing it.

actaully, Phoebe, this method, a Gish Gallop (see Romney's 1st debate technique) adapted to the internet, amounts to a lot cumulatively.

so much bullshit is put out there by any number of sources that proponents of any given policy (climate change, the ACA) have to spend all their time debunking and the issue becomes hopelessly clouded.

just like Slog and it's resident threadjackers.

a lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its pants on.

Don't give Fox News all the credit. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Whatsisname Hannity have a direct AM tasp line into the brains of these idiot/zombie followers.

Seriously, what we're dealing with is a very large-scale propaganda campaign (of the "vast, right-wing conspiracy") that has effectively recruited a bunch of non-thinking low-enders into what amounts to a video-game culture war on the blogs and news sites.

Probably not many of you remember the "hippy" days of the '60s and '70s, but this strikes me as a similar cultural contagion, although 180 degrees in the wrong direction and a particularly ugly demographic. At least back then, we were protesting an unjust war, the draft, the Bomb, violent repression, inequality and societal rigidity. And we had good music (especially for its day). Other than hating having a black President and consequently the entire Federal government, oh and abortion, welfare (especially for non-whites) and same-sex civil rights, I'm not clear what this "movement" is motivated by or hoping to achieve.

Why pay for what you can get for free?

No, but these guys do:

http://www.sonicsrising.com/
http://manywordsforrain.blogspot.com/
http://www.arenasolution.org/

You think people get PAID to post pro-Republican comments on Slog??? Wow. You're even dumber than I thought.

Are "welfare" and "pimp" censored or something?

@14: where's GD4R?

The Gruaniad started doing this (posting troll-y op-eds which are very out of whack with their politics) a long, long time ago. It's a great way to generate page clicks.

"So do Fox News sock puppets troll Fox News comment threads? Or have they trained their readers to do that for them?"

Am I the only one who thinks these questions call for a SLOG poll?

The thing is, these "angry white men" fox following demographic are right to be angry. Their real income and standard of living have collapsed and their right wing GOP leaders have failed to deliver for them. Someone on the left needs to start a conversation along the lines of, "Look, the reason you are feeling poor, and trapped, and powerless is not that the dark and the poor are living it up on welfare which hardly even exists any longer. It is that your boss has broken your union, given himself a bigger portion of the surplus value your toil creates, and then paid off your political leaders to give himself an even bigger unfunded tax cut. Follow the money." Washington hasn't screwed them, Wall Street has.

There have been several commenters on SLOG that appear out of nowhere and are extremely focused on certain issues. ChefJoe is a recent one. Most of the comments were about unionization, minimum wage, etc., and seemed like an attorney doing some hack work.

These should not be confused with the single issue loons, like anti-vaxxers, who are clearly not associated with anything in reality.

@9,

Their belief that other people (and not their own lack of drive, creativity, or intelligence) are holding them back is critical to their self-worth.

@ 14, they may or may not be paid, but political groups definitely have people tasked with commenting on prominent political blogs. It's been going on for as long as there have been political blogs.

@19:

But, they CAN'T blame Wall Street, where a very large percentage of them have invested a significant amount of money in the hopes it'll still be there in an appreciable amount come retirement age. And they've done this without for a moment appreciating the irony in the fact that their employers promoted the creation of 401(k)'s & IRA's expressly for the purpose of shifting the burden of saving for retirement from "employer contributions" (i.e. pensions) to "defined contributions", where employees themselves shoulder most, if not all, of both the burden and the risk.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one!

Conservatives don't need FOX News to be assholes.

I'm not even sure what the point of the post is? More people comment on political posts near elections? It must be a FOX conspiracy! Pro-Obama piece out in the Red Internet gets trolled - surely a cabal of well moneyed conservative strategists have put otherwise honest, mind-their-own-business Americans up to the task for some hard-to-find greenbucks!

It's clearly the most likely conclusion.