Last updated on 2012.02.18
It's Halloween, so the newest Madville Times polls asks you to identify the man behind the mask: Who's taken over writing for South Dakota GOP mouthpiece blog Dakota War College?
Bill Clay/Hans Grüber has written all but one of DWC's posts this month. So who is this new voice for the state Republicans? He has offered no response to requests for his true identity. He's been known to hang out at Caribou Coffee in Sioux Falls... but that could be a clever ruse. Vote for your best guess or insider-informed opinion in the poll in the right sidebar!
Now permit me to try swaying the vote with my own hypotheses, in order of plausibility:
- Tony Post: the new SDGOP executive director came here from Minnesota in May. He recognized that party-run blogs don't play well in the public (remember Republican Tide? or the original Lowell Feld incarnation of Badlands Blue? crap, right?). Deciding that the Republican Party needs a blog with at least the gloss of independence, he has made Dakota War College his plausibly deniable sock puppet.
- Staffer for Senator John Thune: Thune has had good fortune in the past manipulating blog coverage for political advantage. But I guarantee that Bill Clay is not Jon Lauck. Lauck's writing is much sharper than Post's. If DWC is now a Thune tool, Thune is breaking in a new young social media gun.
- Pat Powers: the Dakota War College founder and long-time primary author gave up blogging last year when he won a plum patronage job from new Secretary of State Jason Gant. It seems unlikely that Powers would risk his comfortable Pierre job just to blog again... but devotees of the South Dakota blogosphere can testify to the addictive nature of the medium. Clay's writing feels less punchy than Powers's old stuff... but nearly a year of working in the Pierre bureaucracy could dull anyone's style and wit.
- Staffer for Rep. Kristi Noem: highly unlikely, given the latest Bill/Hans post on Noem's non-conservative position on farm subsidies (hey, Bill/Hans! if you're going to take my ideas, at least link back!). Plus, Noem can't even show up for public town halls over the summer, let alone engage the public effectively online. But you never know....
Or is it someone else? Your votes, comments, clues, and wild speculation are more than welcome. The poll will stay open until Friday at breakfast, when we'll see if we've learned anything... or just had a lot of fun!
I vote Bill Fleming.
They say a young person who isn't a liberal has no heart and a old person who isn't a conservative has no brain. Bill has finally grown up but isn't ready to admit it to the rest of the world.
Cory, i went to bed last night thinking it is Kermit Staggers.
Well, I'm certainly not Bill Clay.
On the contrary, I'm just foolish enough to put my name on the things I write, which perhaps can stand as a little badge of "courage."
Combine that with Troy's observation that I might indeed also have a "heart" and a "brain" (albeit minuscule) and I should be just about ready for the Land of Oz (if the monkeys and the witches don't cut me off at the pass first.)
Meanwhile, vis a vis "Bill Clay" perhaps it's best to "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" Cory. Likely as not, he'll ascend on his own bag of hot air and go back to selling snake oil in Kansas (or some such) sometime soon.
p.s. last I checked, Mr. Jones was/is several years my junior, so I find it sublimely entertaining — and even a bit flattering — that he deigns to opine that I have perhaps "grown up."
Precocious young whipper-snapper that he is.
God love ya, Troy.
I think it's someone in the SOS office or someone who is a friend of theirs from Sioux Falls that the GOP, Thune, Noem staffs feels comfortable feeding stuff to. Why else would their have been so many posts on the EPA etc. Whoever it is sure knows a lot of stuff going on in the GOP.
I am compelled to think it is several people posting under 1 name.
That is my real opinion.
p.s.s. By process of elimination, I have cast my vote for P.P. Of course, as most of you know, I am an inductive (as opposed to a deductive) reasoner as often as not. So you can take my "elimination" word to mean just about any thing you please, I suppose. ;^)
Fleming makes a good point. I cast my vote for a Thune staffer because they are bored by not having an election fight in so long. But Fleming is most likely right. Just a few tweaks to a writing style and you get a different look. But the SDWC is still gossipy like it used to be.
mike... yes, if you're especially diligent in your resolve never to comment, you need only to take great care in the wording of your original post. Note the times BC has posted in the comments section which what special care he has taken to be courteous, deferential, and (most tellingly) brief.
I will say that if it is Mr. Powers, he is doing an exceptionally good job of self-restraint, and I salute him for it.
...the word "which" in the above second sentence should have been deleted. Sorry.
He's a Mac user, Bill. Here's the meta he uses to delete my posts at the War Toilet:
Domain Name midco.net ? (Network)
IP Address 208.107.54.# (Midcontinent Communications)
ISP Midcontinent Communications
Location
Continent : North America
Country : United States (Facts)
State : South Dakota
City : Sioux Falls
Lat/Long : 43.5367, -96.6984 (Map)
Language English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System Macintosh WinNT
Browser Safari 1.3
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.202 Safari/535.1
Javascript version 1.5
Monitor
Resolution : 1366 x 768
Color Depth : 32 bits
Everyone smokes in Hell.
Well, there ya go Cory. A Sioux Falls guy running WindowsNT on a Mac OS. How many of those can there be?
It is not actually a person, it is a robot Scans the internet and pulls out phrases, but not those like, " Romney is a well-lubricated wind vane." Even if that came from another Republican.
Does anything at the War College pass the Turing test these days?
Funny. When he first started writing on DWC I did a search, because I wanted to know who this tool was, and then I figured it out. Why is he anonymous? And what kind of jackass runs Windows on a Mac?
So it's a Sioux Falls tool then. My money says Lauck is feeding the poster crap. Lauck has his hands on everything... Powers probably does also. The whole GOP is in on it and I bet most of them know who it is.
So Scott, who do you think it is? Anybody on Cory's list?
All of the above. During the campaign of 2010, it was clearly apparent that the Wart Collage was, if not been turned over to the SDGOP, coordinated with that office or representatives thereof. Press releases from the SDGOP were reprinted on SDWC before they got out the door. Powers got testy and agitated over anyone observing this connection in public, but circumstances made it very difficult not to draw the conclusion. If the warts had not been removed when Powers officially joined an SDGOP office, one could go back and demonstrate the point. The War Collage seemed to try to recreate the reputation that South Dakota Politics received for bringing down Tom Daschle by going more avidly into the business of character assassination. A number of the accusatory posts were very hastily revised or taken down. However, not before some interested parties saved them for the record. SDWC was always the province of wart breeders, and nothing has changed.
I doubt that David. I like it. It is gossip. PURE AND SIMPLE. Is it serious most of the time? not really but that is why people like it.
Bill I was thinking it was Lauck or one of his lackeys. Gawd, I can't stand that guy!
Lauck would have more punch and more information. Lackey, maybe.
Lauck is the most boring author I have ever read. Try reading something he's written and you will probably put it down 10 pages in. The guy need to learn that facts are important but it's also important to be able to tell a story without getting bored.
Lauck has rhetorical chops, though he can certainly adopt an academic tone and heap up the endnotes (which is not inherently bad: some arguments need to be made in a scholarly, thoroughly documented fashion). But his < ahref="http://daschlevthune.typepad.com/daschle_v_thune/">2004 blog for Thune contained plenty of pithy, punchy writing.