E-mail to Team Maverick

Just sent this e-mail to McCain campaign blogger Michael Goldfarb:

Dear Michael:
About two-thirds of the hits on my blog today have been from people Googling for bikini pictures of Sarah Palin.
Ace of Spades and See-Dubya report the same phenonmenon.
Not meaning to be disrespectful -- extremely irreverent yes, disrespectful no -- but I figure it's only a matter of time before someone digs up a swimwear competition photo from the 1984 Miss Alaska contest and gets it online. So allow me to suggest that the McCain-Palin campaign just go ahead and get the candidate to provide them with such a photo, and release it to right-wing bloggers . . . beginning with me, since I'm the guy that had the moxie to ask.
JPEG format is preferred.
Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain
"The Other McCain"
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/

No sooner had I sent that request than I got an e-mail from a left-wing blogger who had posted this (highly skilled) Photoshop picture:

You see what I'm talking about? Welcome to the New Media age. If we don't have real Sarah Palin bikini pictures, somebody's bound to gin up fake Sarah Palin bikini pictures. So if the McCain campaign doesn't produce those photos of Palin lounging seaside in Daytona pretty soon, this thing could spin out of control. Just trying to be helpful.

UPDATE: Ex-Pat Texan tries an experiment with "Sarah Palin Naked Photos" and reports success. I don't think we need completely stark-raving naked-as-a-jaybird nude, just a nice thong bikini shot from a vacation in some tropical locale. A spring-break-in-Cozumel type of thing.

UPDATE II: For reasons unknown, a Memeorandum thread linked this post to Jeff Goldstein's thorough fisking of anti-Palin memes, which is worth reading.

UPDATE III: Another experimenter, Pirate's Cove, gets results with the "Sarah Palin Bikini" trick. His traffic for the weekend of Aug. 23-24 was 1,655 visits; his traffic for the weekend of Aug. 30-31 was 2,158 -- a traffic increase of 30.4% in one week. So, clearly, there is a market demand for these photos, and it would behoove the GOP, as the party of free enterprise, to respond to this demand. C'mon, Goldfarb: Do you want the Libertarians to beat you to the punch by releasing photos of Bob Barr in a Speedo?