Boo hoo.

Illinois Review editor Fran Eaton is rather upset that her bud John Bambenek is again being pilloried as a fool for his incredibly dense lack of reasoning when it comes to the application of electoral law. For some reason her dour mood has led her to pull a completely idiotic Potemkin argument out of her cracker jack box of irrational rants by suggesting that the American folks over at Daily Kos must be overly violent due to … video games.

What?!

She tries to wax alarmist about people who value reason, with a special somethin’-somethin’ for Gen Y:

Sometimes adolescents fail to emotionally mature as they become adults, and their parents find them hopelessly unemployed and addicted to interactive video games like “Assassin’s Creed,” whose whole purpose is to shoot, kill, maim, destroy and annihilate the enemy.

When those developmentally-delayed folks transfer their frustrations onto the real life political battlefield, some find political blogs such as the liberal haven Daily Kos strangely familiar.

Gee, that’s a leap… Interestingly, surveys of liberal blog readers found the people Ms. Eaton so despises are on average middle-aged at 46 years old (perhaps just a few years younger than she). In light of that, it’s clear Ms. Eaton has failed to “emotionally mature” herself.

If you’d like some insight into what kind of mean and nasty place the U.S. A. will be if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is elected in 2008 and the likes of the Daily Kos’ creepers take over the country, check out the dripping fangs responding to John Bambenek’s [voter fraud complaint]

This coming from someone who just defamed hundreds of thousands of Americans by insinuating they’re unemployed, video game-addicted, developmentally-delayed, immature creeps … with dripping fangs. What was that about “mean and nasty,” Ms. Eaton?

The attack on Bambenek is not a rare exception. Those who’ve been let loose from the “Dementium: The Ward” have also been producing a “Mass Effect” against IR editor’s criticism of their superhero Barack Obama (see “Daily Kos Stir Fries IR Editor“). Why, anyone who would call out Barack Obama’s hypocrisy is an enemy to be annihilated. Forget civil discourse! It’s weak and, why, it’s bloodless!

What doesn’t Fran understand? (Don’t answer. We’d be here for a month.) For one thing, this is not an “attack” on Mr. Bambenek. Rather, it’s an explanation of why Mr. Bambenek’s latest attack on Daily Kos is wholly without merit in light of this little thing called “the law” (it is his second similar baseless attack inside of a year, after all). For another, Ms. Eaton again goes on the attack herself by claiming the fine Americans who read DKos are demented and have been let loose from a video game mental ward….

As for her non-sequitor about Sen. Obama — she again links to her weak-kneed response to my notes about her incessant, myopic and utterly misinformed anti-Christian attacks against Sen. Obama’s church. (Here’s a clue: It’s not “hypocrisy” for a presidential candidate to suggest a new way forward for our country and attend services at a church whose mission includes charitable compassion, strong work ethic, reverence for one’s heritage, and the like. And, again, I’m not a DKos front-pager. I don’t speak for Daily Kos, nor they for me. I simply use their blog’s “diary” tool to cross-post my own writings… which lately have tended toward extolling the virtues of truth and honesty in the face of your own utter disregard for same.)

Yes Fran, “forget civil discourse” — let’s just all twist things out of context and rant about ill-informed and half-baked quixotic quests. You’re doing a fine job of leading the way in that regard.

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By way of background, last year it was Mr. Bambenek’s giddy “stealth project” of filing an FEC complaint claiming that the liberal Daily Kos blog was a partisan entity — essentially just an arm of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately for Mr. Bambenek and his head cheerleader, Ms. Eaton, the complaint was wholly without merit. The FEC had already decided a similar case in favor of free speech and letting blogs discuss as much political and partisan material as they wished (not too different from newspapers and their candidate endorsements and op-ed columns). Plus, Mr. Bambenek, in filing his complaint against Daily Kos demanding they pay fines, etc, completely overlooked the fact that his good friends at Illinois Review (where he also a contributing writer) do the exact same thing as DKos on their own conservative blog.

This week John Bambenek was at it again, most recently complaining to the Michigan Secretary of State that Daily Kos was somehow encouraging voter fraud by suggesting Dems and Independents to vote in that state’s open Republican primary (specifically, for GOP Tier One candidate Mitt Romney). The open primary designation is important because, as Kagro X explains by reviewing the actual law, “open” means any registered voter can choose a Republican ballot and vote as they see fit. Republicans in Michigan have done this several times in the past themselves by pulling Dem ballots and swinging the results around (for presidential, gubernatorial and other primaries).

Yet again, if Mr. Bambenek had only read the law and been able to comprehend it, he would’ve realized his latest complaint is also wholly without merit. (By the way, Illinois has the same open primary system. Keep that in mind as you vote early or head to the polls on Feb. 5th.)

I’ve noted before that Mr. Bambenek appears to be little more than a publicity hound. The guy has columns and blogposts all over the place (good for him, honest) in an extensive web of interconnectedness. His earlier actions regarding the FEC complaint seemed less about a citizen wanting to enforce the law and more about a guy trying on a publicity stunt for size. Perhaps, at it’s heart, that’s what this is really all about. The only alternative is that he Really. Is. Just. That. Dumb. and didn’t bother to even try to learn about the FEC law or the Michigan primary regulations before making his Really Big Announcements about filing these complaints.

Given his past myopic newspaper columns and cockamamie blog posts, I’d lean toward the latter explanation.

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And, no, Adam B, There is an appalling lack of accuracy and standards over among the irrational right at Illinois Review. (Adam B. is the Kos Media LLC attorney and had left a comment over at Illinois Review questioning Ms. Eaton’s “standards”.)

(c/p Daily Kos, e gad)