Did You Ever Wonder Where All Those "Small" Contributions To Barack Obama Came From? Apparently You Are Not The Press.

Mark Steyn:

As readers may recall, a couple of days ago it became clear that the Obama website had intentionally disabled all the basic credit-card-processing security checks and thereby enabled multiple contributions from donors with fake names. The excuse offered in the New York Times story was that, ah, yes, the Obama gang may appear to accept contributions from "Mr Fake Donor" of "23 Fraudulent Lane", but all those phony baloney contributions are picked up by their rigorous offline checking procedures. As many Obama supporters wrote to point out, simply because you get a message saying "Thank you for contributing to the Obama landslide, Mr S Hussein of 47 Spider-Hole Gardens (basement flat), Tikrit!" is no reason to believe any real money is actually leaving real accounts.

The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names "John Galt", "Saddam Hussein", "Osama bin Laden", and "William Ayers", all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it's worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all - multiple names using a single credit card number - the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor.

The reader adds:

Last night on Sheppard Smith’s 3pm-ET show this issue was brought up briefly and they cited the Obama campaign falsely claiming that this sort of thing happens at the McCain site and that they catch these errors later in the processing. Well, it took three days to process my donations and they all skated through their rigorous screening.

And it doesn't happen at the McCain site. This reader tried donating under "John Galt" and "Saddam Hussein" to the McCain campaign and they rejected it.

This should be Journalism 101. I'm not the guy who made Obama's fundraising a story. The media did that when they ran hundreds of puff pieces marveling at his record-breaking cash haul, and in particular the gazillions of small donors. Isn't the fact that his website has chosen to disable basic fraud protection procedures at the very least a legitimate addendum to those stories?

Oh, sorry, I was waiting for the chirping crickets. But evidently Mr C Cricket is over at Obama Central charging 20 bucks to his MasterChirp.