I agree. I have no idea why this is on Slashdot. It's not technology news. It's not even news at all.

Back in 2008, Rush Limbaugh tried something similar he called "Operation Chaos", where he encouraged his listeners to switch parties and vote in the Democratic Primary to get Hillary Clinton to win and later to keep her in to lengthen the Primary. The idea was that whoever eventually won would emerge weaker and would lose to McCain. Also, Republicans believed that there were more registered Democrats because of Operation Chaos, and when the election actually happened, they would be revealed as actually Republicans and McCain would win.

As we all know, it didn't work. Obama beat McCain handily. So if Rush Limbaugh, who has millions of listeners couldn't pull this off, how can an unknown website do this?

Moreover, I think it's misleading to suggest that "Democrats" are doing this. I expected to see a link to Democrats.org or to at least a high traffic Democratic Party website, such as dailykos.com. But no, this site has so little traffic that it doesn't even have an Alexa ranking In fact, searching for sites that link to this domain reveal not even Democratic sources, but Republicans (freerepublic.com is the #2 domain in results), so clearly this isn't catching on with Democrats. Whois is masked, so we don't know who actually owns the domain, but it's just as likely to be a Republican astroturfing organization.

So, how did this end up on Slashdot? Was this some sort of paid placement situation or attempt by the domain owner to drive more traffic to the site? Some lame idea of saying that "both sides 'do it' and engage in these types of silly games? Somebody has compromising photos of CmdrTaco? I guess we'll never know.

The problem is that American politics is a team sport. The bigger problem is that team sport mentality is just accepted as the norm.

Politics -- as voting -- should be a dry, boring act. Back when 30% of the electorate was actually engaged, it was. Now, demagogues fill the airwaves with outlandish accusations, turning countrymen against each other.

After all the demagoguery that is constantly being used to rile some people who are genuinely distressed because they've lost their job/house/life, I worry some of these people are genuinely confused; the enemy is no longer Osama -- it's now Obama.