Political Irony

People who use microblogging sites like Twitter are used to URL-shortening services like Bit.ly, Tr.im, and Tinyurl.com. But apparently those sites are not “conservative” enough, so the Republican party launched their own URL-shortening service on Monday called GOP.am, but with an annoying twist. When someone clicks on a GOP.am shortened URL, it displays the original page, but with a GOP toolbar across the top and bottom of the page (this toolbar doesn’t go away, even if you click on a link to go to a new page). It also has an animated Michael Steele, who walks around the bottom right of your browser window and even talks, as if he is showing off the web page.

So, what do you suppose happened next?

Those damn liberals took advantage of this service to point to hundreds of sex sites. The best part was that Steele was saying “Notice something different?” on this page.

But wait, there’s more! As a funny followup fail, the GOP took the service down on Tuesday in order to clean out the pornographic URLs, and when they brought it back up it had a warning “If you use GOP.am for spamming, illegal purposes or to promote lude content, your GOP.AM URL will be disabled.” They probably meant to use the word “lewd” not “lude” but then maybe they have been laying on the drugs a little too heavily lately.