Both See-Dub and S&L have covered yesterday’s Washington Post article on a professional stalker for the Barack Obama campaign who is doing tax-exempt opposition research on his behalf at the Institute for Advanced Study.  The Institute itself is a playground for eggheads to study whichever intellectual shiny object captures their attention.

Danielle Allen, a presumably smart chick who earned a $500,000 “genius grant” when she was 29, now spends her erudite days and nights stalking commenters on FreeRepublic.com as “research” at the Institute and cataloging their conversations about The Messiah so that she can turn their heretofore anonymous names, ages, and occupations over for print in the Washington Post:

As an Obama supporter — she had met the senator while she worked as a dean at the University of Chicago — it made her angry. And curious.

“I started thinking, ‘How does one stop it?’ ”

Why, the tax-exempt way of course!  Only in America can a “scientist” get paid to google e-mail addresses in a chain of spam to harass private citizens because they had the temerity to ask questions about a political candidate for the highest office in the land.  Chicago, “angry”, and an Obama supporter?  Did she attend Trinity United too?

Allen counted 23 freepers among those engaging in regular discussions about Obama’s religion (shock! and or horror! – ed.), and isolated a handful whom she began to suspect as having a role in the e-mail. Sifting through hundreds of postings, she began to piece together their identities.

This is textbook cyberstalking.  The focus of her campaign is to ferret out the ancestry of the e-mail that the Obamessiah is a rogue Muslim and smash these blasphemers of His True Teachings.  Nice work if you can find it.  The Institute must be very proud to add this chapter to their storied history, whether in collaboration or not with the Obama campaign, in the use of their funding as a de facto campaign contribution to focus solely on dissenting opinions against one politician and outing anonymous characters on the internet when the person responsible for the e-mail has already claimed it.

The WaPo includes the names, ages, former occupations and city/states of these dastardly people wondering aloud in a public forum about a Presidential candidate’s religious leanings.  However, the true purveyor of the e-mail asks some good questions of the Institute for Stalking’s mandate in the comments of the WaPo piece:

1. In my news conference yesterday I raised the question of Ms. Allen using a tax-exempt facility to do partisan political research when she was presumably hired to pursue more meaningful activity at the Princeton IAS. Some of the many posts on your web site raised the same topic. Is Allen’s “e-mail” project something Allen is claiming as an academic pursuit under the IAS? People would want to know. I am surprised that Mr. Mosk did not question why a tax-exempt facility is being used as a political opposition research operation, or whether Allen applied to be funded to pursue this activity.

2. Closely associated with the first question is the more critical question of how Mr. Mosk identified Ms. Allen to do a full-page article on an unknown person.

I would only have one two more questions to add to this:

1)  Have you shared any of your “research” with the Obama campaign?

2) Is this your My Barack Obama page, honey?  Because those comments about John McCain being unelectable because he has Alzheimer’s probably aren’t too nice for somebody who likes researching “smears”.

Those glasses look familiar.  That’s all I’m saying.

Thanks for playing.  Btw, I use Google too.  (Correction:  I use Scroogle.)  Can I be a scientist?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Bedwetting Leftists, Bizarro, Politics, The Obamessiah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.