After covering the James Dobson/SpongeBob story, Keith Olbermann found himself the target of a spam campaign:
The spam e-mails began coming in Tuesday night. They were pretty routine, damning me to eternal fires and reminding me what they “did” to Dan Rather and how I’d be next. But they were generated from Dobson’s own website, which of course negates their impact, and as a result a lot of them were downright hilarious.
Something approaching 20 percent of them were simply blank. Others began with, or consisted entirely of, the preamble “(Please delete these words and type your own message here.)” Others referred to Dr. Dobson as Dr. Dobsin, Dr. Dobsen, or Mr. Dobbins. Many were cut-and-paste repetitions of one another, and about 20 percent were from false e-mail addresses.
One particularly useful one included the actual instructions on the Website as to how to conduct the campaign…
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Firstly, you wouldn’t think a member of this group could misspell “Christian,” but sure enough, one of the missives had the word as “Christain” three times. I think just about every word you could imagine was butchered at some point (and we’re not talking typos here – we’re talking about repeated identical misspellings):
Spong, Spounge, Spnge – presumably meaning “Sponge.”
Dobsin, Dobsen, Debsin, Dubsen, Dobbins – presumably Dr. Dobson.
Sevility — I’m not sure about this one. This might be “civility,” or it might refer to the city in Spain.
The best of them was not a misspelling but a Freudian slip of biblical proportions. A correspondent, unhappy that I did not simply agree with her fire-and-brimstone forecast for me, wrote “I showed respect even though I disagreed with you and yet you have the audacity to call me intelligent.”
Well, you have me there, Ma’am. My mistake.