Conservapedia: Stop Obama with Our Hit List

Andrew Schlafly’s Conservapedia presented to the world what can only be described as a hit list of Senate Democrats to be assassinated in order to erase the Democratic majority. Anti-American, treasonous felony, or good, clean fun?

In what was later claimed by Conservapedia site administrators to be vandalism, a long-term wiki editor calling himself “QWest” subtly recommended stopping Obama’s policies by incapacitating Democratic Senators from states with Republican governors.

Here’s the original page (h/t to Wonkette):

So, if you bump off the listed Senators, their Republican governors will replace them with Republican appointees, providing a Republican majority. Interesting approach.

After the page hit the blogosphere, administrator “TK” replaced the article with the following message:

This “Article” Was The Work Of An Internet Parodist/Vandal

Conservapedia in no way sanctioned it, and cannot, because of the wiki format, completely stop the work of political terrorists, who are intent upon, dedicated to, mocking our conservative, Christian-friendly encyclopedia

Thank you.

–TKAdmin/Talk Here 16:34, 24 January 2009 (EST)

Well, that explains it. It was the work of some hacker who joined up that day to post this anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic, something not quite so bad) incitement to revolutionary violence. Or was it?

Blogger Tony Sidaway thinks not, and did some investigating:

I found that the article had actually been created by a user called QWest, an established user who has contributed much content to Conservapedia. He alerted Conservapedia to Obama’s “My Muslim faith” gaffe, he contributed “Abstinence only sex education doesn’t work” to “Liberal Myths About Education”, he added items about the bacterial flagellum, consciousness, symbiosis and the bat to “Counterexamples to evolution”. He repeatedly tried to add Barack Obama to a list of prominent Muslims in the “Islam” article. He started the “Obama and socialism” section in the article on Barack Obama.

. . .

I also noticed that TK had neither blocked QWest from editing, nor approached him on the wiki to communicate with him about his creation of inappropriate content.

I left a message on TK’s user talk page, informing him of his apparent error in blaming the creation of the article on a vandal or parodist, and outlined my findings about QWest’s history of good faith editing.

Shortly afterwards, the Conservapedia website started showing [an] error message to all visitors, and refused to display any articles.

Is Andrew Schlafly palling around with domestic terrorists on his website? Or did one of his approved editors simply get a little overzealous?

We may never know.

Note: We do know that the Paliban Daily does not endorse the assassination of Senators. Consistent with Christian Reconstructionist/Dominion Theology, the only “revolution” we promote is at the ballot box.

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3. Take Action: Tell President Obama To Stop Faith-Based Employment Discrimination!
4. Tea Party Nation urges businesses to stop hiring to hurt Obama
5. Tea Party Nation Demands To Know If Obama Received Scholarships For Foreign Students

Jenny Donati is webmistress and co-editor of Secular News Daily. Jenny is an outspoken secularist who believes firmly in the separation of church and state. She demands evidence to support arguments, and holds herself to the same standard. She doesn't write about herself in the third person . . . but there's a first time for everything.

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