Liberal PAC Takes Credit For Gingrich Website Prank
Visitors to newtgingrich.com are taken to a variety of pages, including those of Freddie Mac and Tiffany's.
| Posted Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2011, at 4:02 PM
Photograph by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. The liberal pranksters apparently behind newtgingrich.com came forward Wednesday afternoon, sending out a press release trumpeting the fact they own the Web address in question. The culprits: American Bridge 21st Century.
The Atlantic's Molly Ball points out that the group also took to Craigslist, where the pro-Obama PAC posted an add offering the domain name for a cool million.
"We thought of giving it away, but we wouldn't want to be accused of being socialists," the ad reads. "So, make your best offer. We're asking for $1 million, but we'd be happy to accept $500,000 in bling. Heck in the spirit of Christmas we might even let it go for $10,000."
Wednesday, Dec. 21 p.m.: If Newt Gingrich isn’t happy with the current tone of the GOP campaign, it’s probably a safe bet he’s not going to like this.
Some prankster appears to have taken over the website newtgingrich.com. Internet users who enter that URL into their address bar on Wednesday are being taken to any one of a number of pages around the Web that remind visitors of a few of the campaign stories that we're guessing Gingrich would rather everyone forget about.
By no means an exhaustive list, but here are a few of the pages that you’re redirected to: Freddie Mac’s homepage; Tiffany and Co.’s homepage; a YouTube clip of the We Can Solve It climate commercial Gingrich did with Nancy Pelosi; and a couple of not-so-flattering news articles about Gingrich’s campaign.
Gingrich's official campaign Web page is housed at newt.org, which is currently running as one would expect it to, and it is not clear if the longer address was ever owned by the candidate or the campaign in the first place. It is also unclear who is behind the newtgingrich.com site, although a quick Google search shows that the possibility of taking it over and filling it with anti-Gingrich content had been discussed in recent weeks by users on a number of online discussion boards, including on bodybuilding.com (the board thought to be responsible for posting Mark Zuckerberg's private Facebook photos), the Free Republic, and a forum for Ron Paul supporters.
