No doubt, you've all seen them. You're perusing one of your favorite progressive web sites and a provocative banner ad luring you to a poll beckons you to click away. This poll, as expected, was being conducted by one of the usual suspects, the extremely Right Wing "news" site, Newsmax. The headline reads: "Do You support Ted Cruz's Efforts to Defund Obamacare?".
The poll was a simple 3-question form. The First 2 being, "Do You Support Ted Cruz?", and "ACA, is it a good law?", Yes or No. I answered "No" to both, of course. The 3rd question asked if you voted for Romney or Obama in 2012. Partly, to hedge my bets that my vote would be recorded and partly just to mess with them, I chose the option for Romney as the 2012 candidate I voted for. As usual, I was required to provide my email address and zip code and then proceeded to hit the "submit" button. Done, right? No, not quite. I was then directed to another page stating that I would be getting an email to confirm my information before my vote would be added to the poll results. 2 hours later I'm still waiting.
Apparently, even if you voted for Romney (which I didn't), but don't support Ted Cruz and and his efforts to defund Obamacare, your vote is simply not wanted for this Newsmax "poll".
I won't go on about the obvious hypocrisy of the spin machine that resides inside the impenetrable ideological bubble of the conservative media. It's all been written about ad infinitum here and elsewhere. Not surprising. Not the most earth-shattering bit of news. I just thought I'd share what I found to be an amusing and telling little bit of "business as usual" from the conservative side that I encountered this morning.
And I so wanted to get on the Newsmax mailing list.
Sun Oct 06, 2013 at 8:44 AM PT: Well, it appears I did indeed get on the Newsmax mailing list. I've since yesterday, received at least 2 of their newsletters, including links to Right Wing books and other products they're pushing on the faithful.
Note: After over 24 hours I finally received that email confirmation to be included in the above-mentioned poll. My guess is that there was enough bad press and blogosphere chatter about their so-called "poll", that they finally went back through all the unwanted submissions and honored them.