The problem with ferver

By now, you have probably heard that Redstate.com has banned Ron Paul Supporters from posting on their site. If you haven't, here's a little taste of the rationale of the ban:

Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul. Those with accounts more than six months old may proceed as normal.

Now, I could offer a long-winded explanation for *why* this new policy is being instituted, but I'm guessing that most of you can probably guess. Unless you lack the self-awareness to understand just how annoying, time-consuming, and bandwidth-wasting responding to the same idiotic arguments from a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans can be. Which, judging by your comment history, you really don't understand, so allow me to offer an alternate explanation: we are a bunch of fascists and we're upset that you've discovered where we keep the black helicopters, so we're silencing you in an attempt to keep you from warning the rest of your brethren so we can round you all up and send you to re-education camps all at once.

Level of annoyance this causes to the Ron Paul campaign proper (scale of 0-10): 0. This is great free publicity and may even get Dr. Paul a few mentions in "real" news.


Level of perceived annoyance this causes for Ron Paul supporters who can't do much more than copy and paste "RON PAUL 2008" 100 times in a single response: 10. "OMG! The Man's trying to keep us down! They don't want us to be heard!"

Level of actual annoyance this causes for Ron Paul supporters who can't do much more than copy and paste "RON PAUL 2008" 100 times in a single response: 0.5. Relax, chemically imbalanced Ron Paul supporters, nearly the whole rest of the internet is still open and ready to business with you.

Level of annoyance to Ron Paul supporters who seem normal: 8. Now there is a mess to be cleaned up, chemically imbalanced Ron Paul supporters to calm down, and our own morale to pick back up.

Level of annoyance this causes for Redstate.com: 6.84. Evan though Redstate thinks it has solved their problem. Their plight is not yet over. Several times over the last hour I've gotten slow responses from their site, and I predict no fewer than 3,000 emails from angry Ron Paul supporters being angry and 25 from loyal readers of their site being grateful. Not to mention all the extra page views from being dugg or blogged about by The NY Times. That should add a little to the "time-wasting," and "bandwidth-wasting" those poor folks there have to put up with.