Curious

Now That's Curious:

I see via InstaPundit that there's some dirty-trickery at work from the Obama campaign. It reports a site that claims Palin is in favor of gay marriage.

Interesting. There’s nothing else on the page. This sure looks like the work of the dastardly right-wing anti-gay attack machine, doesn’t it?

But look who’s really behind this.

In the Linux console, if you enter the following commands, you can learn the secrets of a political dirty trick. First, look up the host of ‘sarahpalingayrights.com’ to get the site’s IP address.

host sarahpalingayrights.com
sarahpalingayrights.com has address 74.208.74.232

Then use the same command to look up the domain name pointer of that IP address.

host 74.208.74.232
232.74.208.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer obamadefense.com

Well, well. “Obamadefense.com,” eh?

And what happens if you enter obamadefense.com on your browser’s address line?

Why, you’re redirected to none other than FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama site that’s supposed to be defending him against smears.

Looks like they may have a second purpose: to generate a few smears of their own.

Sloppy mistake, that.

What I find most interesting, though, is that the Obama campaign thinks it has more to gain by spreading that rumor than by spreading the truth. Palin is, as I gather from what I've read about her in the last day or so, actually strongly opposed to gay marriage (as are most Americans) but also to civil partnerships (which most Americans support). Obama himself took that very position in his recent speech: anti-marriage, pro-unions.

So why is it that his campaign is going to the trouble (and risk!) of running this attack, instead of just pointing out the truth? It's an odd thing to do, when they could presumably benefit with swing voters more by simply telling the truth.