"Beth," "Anne," and "Yolanda"

By: Lowell
Published On: 1/10/2006 2:00:00 AM

Now this is rather odd.  Last night, I got three comments on this blog, purportedly from three different women, all blasting James Webb for somehow allowing sexual misconduct in the Navy.  Interestingly, the three women - "Yolanda," "Anne" (who claimed to be a retired Lt. Commander), and "Beth" - wrote in within 19 minutes of each other, and all said pretty much the same thing.  I found this very strange, so I checked their IP addresses.  Lo and behold, they all had the SAME IP ADDRESS - 70.17.114.76.  Here's the information on this address:

OrgName: Verizon Internet Services Inc.
OrgID: VRIS
Address: 1880 Campus Commons Dr
City: Reston
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20191
Country: US

Hmmmm.  What's even weirder about these comments is that they were all made on old posts, from November 1 and December 20.  As my colleague Greg points out:

Most people don't go back and post comments to blog threads from two months ago -- since the discussions there have long since ceased. But they're still in the search engines, and someone appears to be trying to get a message out to people who run across them from search engine results (like reporters looking for info on Webb).  Given that they're all the same IP, it's either an effort by a PR firm, or one very determined anti-Webb activist.

Oh, and just to make things even more bizarre, over at Goodbye Jim, a bunch of (supposedly) ex-military types all of a sudden showed up yesterday at that anti-Moran site, when none of them had ever posted there before, specifically to slam James Webb about women in the Navy (ironically, in a post by Jonathan Mark slamming Harris Miller!). 

Coincidence?  It's possible, but if you believe that then I have some nice swampland in southern Iraq to sell you!!  Let's face it, someone's obviously so afraid of James Webb that they feel the need to spread blatant lies about a man who opened up more billets to women in the Navy than anyone before or after him.  As far as Tailhook is concerned, Webb wasn't even Navy Secretary then (Tailhook occurred in September 1991, three years after Webb had resigned).  Webb's feelings about Tailhook?  From a Frontline interview on PBS, here's what Webb had to say:

Q: Tailhook. How do you think it was handled by the leaders of the Navy?

WEBB: I think it was handled very poorly by the leaders of the Navy. And I say that with sadness, not with disgust. When I did Nightline, they asked me if I'd ever been at a Tailhook convention. I said no. They asked me if I had been Secretary of the Navy and I was there, what would I have done? And I said I would have found the senior admiral present, and I would have told him to go clean that up. And if it hadn't been done in a certain period of time, he would have been relieved. This was before the larger ramifications started falling out. That is the way that it should have been dealt with.

Pretty clear, huh?  So what's this anti-Webb jihad by "Beth," "Anne," and "Yolanda," all using the same IP address?  I don't know, but it sure smells fishy to me.

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