What SHOULD have happened yesterday

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

Lieberman's website crashes and his techies put it back pronto. This non-event makes barely a ripple. Lieberman suspects hackage and issues a statement saying so "My website is down and we suspect it was hacked, by whom, we do not know." They call the FBI and the police to make sure that political dirty tricks haven't been played. He still loses by a mile.

The media coverage should have been, in about the 29th election story down:
Lieberman site crashes. Hacked?
And that sentence should just about be the whole story - because that is about all they know.

Contrast that with what really happened:
Lieberman makes specific allegations of voter suppression and dirty tricks against the Lamont campaign with widespread TV, print, radio and web coverage, while the vote was going on. He apparently makes little or no effort to get his website back up and running because the story is better and he gains more if it stays down and he retains his victimhood. He closes some of the gap as the undecideds decide to defend Lieberman guy from the evil, partisan,insane, crazy left blogger candidate.

The person who stood out for his conduct and responses was Lamont.

What should happen today is that we find out more definitively about the crash and the media makes some effort at responsible reporting.

[Demit]

1. Why he thought that a crashed website would affect the vote is really

beyond me. On the day of the election? I kind of doubt that people going about their daily lives & squeezing in some time to get to the polls had a chance to even hear about it. All this pathetic episode will do is to show everyone, if he continues to talk about it, what a delusional WATB Lieberman is.

[Vinca]

2. I'm still betting the crash was Rove-inspired. nt

[Atman]

3. What really happened is basic hosting 101

You DON'T put a large, heavily trafficked web site on a bargain-basement server that costs $15 a month. They aren't designed for that. I actually live in a sort of pseudo-fear about my own web site. It gets good traffic, but I'm also on a fairly basic hosting program with only a couple of extra bells and whistles. But if one of my 'toons "went viral," or got some national press attention, the first thing I'd have to do is call my host and upgrade my hosting package to handle the extra traffic. Actually, Joe might be lucky. If I exceed my bandwidth, my site won't go down...I'll just get a whopping bill for every byte of extra traffic. I've heard of people getting $3000 hosting bills after something on their site unexpectedly "took off" and gain attention on the internet. Joe's web guy should have known that, should have been prepared for that, and should have had the balls to tell Joe that's what happened when it happened, instead of the campaign concocting this phony whiny-assed "They hacked my site!" meme. That just reeks of Luddite old men who don't actually know how to check their own e-mail telling us how the internet tubes work.

This was a simple server overload, no doubt. Not a doubt in my mind.