Chapter 1 “kenny”

“kenny” (officially O-BOT 631) struggled to consciousness after a restless and very short night’s sleep. The first word that came into his slowly clearing brain was “Obama” and the second “coffee.”

“Why do I do this?” kenny thought to himself as he sipped his coffee and headed to the secret O-BOT discussion board hidden at www.obamaconspiracy.org to pick up the latest directives. They had told him at the clinic that caffeine was not a substitute for sleep. He was falling asleep at the computer more often. But it was time to get to work. “Being an O-BOT is as close to a 24/7 job as it gets.”

kenny cut and pasted his assignment list, his list of birther blogs to read. He started the VPN to  mask his real Internet address, and adopted the “Melanie” persona. Melanie was a slightly ditzy housewife, rabidly against Obama, but not able to complete sentences, or a thought. Her job was to discredit and distract the nObamas, and particularly to derail any serious discussion before it went anywhere. “Melanie is fun,” thought kenny as he started scanning the more recent messages, always on the watch for mischief to make and information that needed to be passed up the chain of command.

“Malvo” was next with another IP address. Malvo was supposed to be a lawyer and connected to a large conservative law firm that represented Fox News Network. kenny really didn’t much about the law except for the few courses he took online from William Howard Taft University, paid for out of the O-BOT funds left over from Obama’s run for president. But none of the nObamas knew any law either; as long as he appeared to be on their side, they would believe almost anything. kenny was getting concerned about what he was seeing on the the Natural Born Citizen…Schwarzenegger? blog. They were starting to come together and make sense. “Probably time to bring in O-BOT Technical and crash the site.”

kenny’s favorite personas were the battling duo “RabidPatriot66” and “OnlyConstitution14” whose job it was to pit the birthers against the “Meat and Two bunch“. “There’s nothing more vicious than infighting” or so they said at O-BOT training. “All you have to do is get them arguing among themselves, and they’re effectively neutralized.” It was pretty easy to pit the “born in Hawaii, but ineligible” against the “not born in Hawaii, so ineligible.” Since both sides were wrong, it was a given that each had a lot of criticism they could level towards the other. RabidPatriot66 was effective at angering one side while alienating the other. OnlyConstitution14, besides being a jerk, was always in attack mode too. Due to their engineered debate some major blogs were effectively shut down as they turned into shouting matches as they became nastier and nastier.

Next kenny had to touch base with his assigned list of librarians. They had to be stroked. Just about every librarian in the country was least an O-Bot sympathizer and O-BOT Command made sure that the library “ask a librarian” web sites were always assigned to reliable supporters.

He smiled as he looked at his new shiny laptop, courtesy of the Obama transition team. No more interruptions when he was absolutely forced to go to the bathroom. And he kept smiling as he remembered not one but two super cool online conferences scheduled for the afternoon: the seminar on Information vs Disinformation and then the meeting with the legal team for a briefing of what to respond to arguments about “standing” and “natural born citizenship.”

To be continued…