Damn. I missed it
Bush Site Unplugs Poster Tool By Chris Ulbrich
10:37 AM Mar. 12, 2004 PT
The Bush-Cheney presidential campaign disabled features of a tool on its website Thursday that pranksters were using to mock the Republican presidential ticket.
The tool originally let users generate a full-size campaign poster in PDF format, customized with a short slogan of their choice. But Bush critics began using the site to place their own snarky political messages above a Bush-Cheney '04 logo and a disclaimer stating that the poster was paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.
The campaign changed the tool Thursday so that users could no longer enter their own messages, but only select from a pull-down list of states and coalition groups. The campaign didn't respond to requests for comment.
The poster tool has been up and running since December, but Ana Marie Cox, editor of the Washington political gossip blog Wonkette, turned it into a weapon of mass satire this week when she devoted several posts to the inner workings of the device she dubbed the "Sloganator."
At Cox's request, close to 200 Wonkette readers sent in slogans which they had slipped through the system. Among them: "Run for your lives," "They sure smell like old people," and the Orwellian, "A boot stomping on a human face forever."
Cox also published lists of words the tool was allowing and, perhaps more tellingly, those it was not. Not surprisingly, it rejected the usual four-letter words and sexual lingo, but it also banned more innocuous terms like "stupid," "evil," "terrorists" and "Iraq."
