Oktober Surprise
In politics the vaunted “October Surprise” has been a powerful tactic to turn the tide of past elections. Perhaps the most infamous was the charges leveled against George W. Bush by CBS News and Dan Rather in the run up to the 2004 presidential election. CBS News and Rather aired a hit piece stating that “W” only really served in the National Guard to avoid a stint in Vietnam. Rather’s dramatic use of documents from the National Guard came back to haunt him as bloggers quickly and easily identified the documents as forged and faked. How embarrassing that a national news organization was unable to determine the legitimacy of documents while folks sitting at home could.
I had thought about the framework for this posting for a little while, but only recently found the hook that I wanted to use. I was checking in on Facebook and noticed a posting from a friend of a friend ”liking” a photograph [that actually makes sense if you use facebook] of President Obama and his family returning from their Hawaiian vacation. Many of the friends posted comments and since I surmise from the photograph that most of these folks are young I was not too surprised at the comments.