You Sank My Battleship... Or Maybe Not

If you were reading blogs back in August 2006, you may remember that Joe Lieberman's campaign threw a big Hissy Fit, claiming that Ned Lamont's team (and in particular those dirty fuckin' hippie bloggers) hacked their website and brought it down. It was clear within about 10 minutes that the "joe2006.com" site was strained because they paid something like $100 for server space and couldn't deal with the expected traffic for a hotly contested primary. Since Lieberman and his staff probably think "the Internet" is something you catch butterflies with, they didn't understand such things, and simply decided that those Lamont nerds must have put a "net-worm" or "hack-moose" on their CyberPages and ruined everything.

Well, it took the FBI a bit longer, but they eventually came around to what everyone in the blogosphere already knew:

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti-Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters.

"The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack," according to the e-mail.

A program that could have detected a legitimate attack was improperly configured, the e-mail states.

"New Haven will be administratively closing this investigation," it concluded.

The point of the Hissy Fit was to get the media to report on those mean, dirty bloggers, not to necessarily gain an advantage in the particular primary election but to set the narrative for the 2006 general election. So it worked.

One of these days the media isn't going to get punked so easily... Scratch that, they'll keep getting punked.