Stupid Political Watch: Republicans Spamming

Republicans are apparently passing e-mail names around like party favors.

Yeah, yeah. Puns suck, but I couldn’t pass that one up.

As some readers will recall, I signed up for all the viable presidential candidates’ e-mail lists during the ’08 primaries.

Doing so resulted in a series of columns criticizing and ridiculing the candidates’ e-mail practices: one criticizing most of the candidates for sending e-mail under multiple “from” addresses, and three ridiculing President Barack Obama’s campaign for allowing me to sign up as “Stupid Poopeyhead” and addressing me as “Stupid” throughout the campaign.

Now it’s the Republican Party’s turn.

I have been getting a slew of unsolicited political e-mail from conservative and libertarian causes to which I did not opt in.

The latest was a message last week from “Gun Alerts.”

“Obama Lies—Senate Uses Sneak Attack on Guns,” said the subject line.

Now it just so happens that I am a gun owner. I grew up spending summers working on my aunt and uncle’s beef-cattle, hog and chicken farm in Pennsylvania. I have shoveled more crap than I care to remember, though there are certainly enough people out there who think I’m still shoveling it.

On farms, guns are considered tools. And though I haven’t done it in a while, I used to enjoy target and clay-pigeon shooting, so I own a couple .22 rifles and four shotguns of various gauges.

And, yes, they are safely out of my son’s reach.

Also, one of my favorite stories involves gun stupidity. Back in the early 80s, three Air Force buddies and I were in the Arizona desert target shooting with a.357 magnum. One of us—I forget his name, now—decided his lime-green Datsun 1200 would look really cool with bullet holes in the driver’s door. So he fired five or six rounds into it.

Then he remembered he had forgotten to roll up the driver-door window before he shot.

In any case, I support the right to own guns. However, “Gun Alerts” doesn’t know this.

But since I signed up for a bunch of conservative lists, I’m getting messages from various conservative causes to which I did not opt in—the Republican National Committee’s weekly e-mail newsletter and sporadic messages from the Minuteman PAC and some group called the Campaign for Liberty for three more examples.

The same cannot be said for the Democrats.

Sure, the Obama team sends e-mail under various “from” lines—not wise—and they all still address me as “Stupid,” but I am not suddenly getting e-mail from, say, Planned Parenthood or labor unions, and I have not heard from Hillary Clinton since she became Secretary of State.

However, there is evidence the Obama camp isn’t entirely pristine when it comes to permission-based e-mail. According to a November article in the Washington Post, Obama’s folks briefly offered his 10 million-name e-mail list of supporters as collateral for a loan he didn’t end up needing.

If his campaign staff had done so and ended up forking over Obama’s file, what they and whoever took the list off his hands would have learned—and what Republicans will learn—is that the tactic of passing e-mail addresses to various related causes will fail utterly.

Just because it’s political speech doesn’t mean ISPs won’t block it as spam. The First Amendment does not apply to e-mailers sucking up ISPs’ resources by forcing them to process their junk.

Yahoo is already shunting conservative messages to my spam folder. Messages from Mitt Romney have ended up there. So have e-mails from Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul and Fred Thompson.

If Republicans don’t clean up their sloppy e-mail practices, soon their messages will get blocked from reaching people’s inboxes altogether. And then even people who want to hear from them won’t be able to.