Exposing the Overstock.com Swiftboat Campaign

William K. Wolfrum, who exposed the Martin Eisenstadt hoax--a widely quoted personage on Sarah Pailin who did not exist--produced a detailed post today on a subject known well to readers of this blog, which is the ongoing smear campaign of Overstock.com's ethically-challenged CEO Patrick Byrne.

Diane Tucker has a worthwhile follow-up in the Huffington Post.

What's interesting about Tucker's and Wolfrum's analysis is that they place Byrne, and his loyal stooge Judd Bagley, in the long tradition of Internet hoaxes and fraudsters, in this case hoodwinking the Daily Kos. So is their idea for an Internet truth squad.

These are two gutsy people. I'm sure they'll pay a heavy price for their posts in terms of vilification and abuse from Byrne's crew of paid stalkers.

By the way, one interesting point in Wolfrum's post was Bagley's outright lie about the connection between Byrne and his Deep Capture smear site. Bagley, he says, "denies working for Byrne."

Yeah, right. It would be more accurate to say that he works for a partnership that is owned by a hedge fund that is controlled by Byrne, as I described a while back. In other words, he works for Byrne. The dipsy-doodle CEO is pretty direct in stating his control of the website in two recent posts on a stock chat board, which can be found here and here.

Can't say I totally blame Bagley for clinging to lies so tenaciously. They're all he has left.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.