Anonymous Claims It Stopped Karl Rove From Hacking The Election By Hacking ORCA

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303. Some thoughts on your thoughts

There has been a kind of underground online war being carried on since 2010 between the right and left, mostly on Twitter and in blogs, much of it anonymously or by way of sock puppets.

Some of the participants on the left are associated with Anonymous. Many of those on the right are tied in with the late Andrew Breitbart's online empire. (The failed film "Occupy Unmasked," which was a Breitbart-related attempt to claim that Occupy was all an Anonymous plot, was perhaps the most public manifestation of this war.)

Velvet Revolution -- the organization which made the offer of a reward to which the Anonymous letter in the OP responds -- got dragged into the battle willy-nilly at some point last year and woven into right-wing conspiracy theories involving George Soros and Barbara Streisand.

There are at least loose connections between the people on the right and the Romney campaign, which indicated at one point that it didn't trust the mainstream media and preferred to get its message out through avenues like the Breitbart sites.

The Ace of Spades blog which you cite and Erick Erickson of redstate.org are both part of this right-wing blogger network. When they jumped in right after the election to blame the Romney meltdown on untested software and excessive reliance on consultants, it seemed like an uncharacteristic but refreshing dose of honesty and self-criticism. But now I'm thinking that if the Anonymous claims are true, it could have instead been a preemptive attempt to lay down a counter-story that would undercut those claims.

That's a big "if" -- but I think it should be factored into your calculations of what seems probable. At the very least, take into account that Ace of Spades is not an unbiased source and may be playing its own games.