After a recent CNBC Republican candidate debate, CNBC threw a poll of on their website asking readers who they thought won the debate. Ron Paul supporters responded by flooding the poll with votes for Ron Paul in an attempt to skew the poll’s results. Ron Paul won by a whopping 75%. CNBC responded by removing the poll from the website. This from the CNBC website:

And the computer logs showed the poll had been hit with traffic from Ron Paul chat sites. I learned other Internet polls that night had been hit in similar fashion. Congratulations. You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can’t help but admire that.

What’s to admire? I didn’t realize that being “well-organized” and “feeling strongly about something” were necessarily traits to admire. Nazis were well-organized. Nazis felt strongly about something. Should they be admired too? Not that I am comparing Ron Paul fanboys to Nazis. Even though at least some neo-Nazis are Ron Paul supporters and it seems that at least some of the people helping to flood these online polls in Ron Paul’s favor have goose-stepped over from antisemitic white supremest websites.

What about substance? Having fans on the Internet that spam online polls and vote for every Ron Paul story on Digg aren’t things to brag about.

Also from the CNBC website:

But you also ruined the purpose of the poll. It was no longer an honest “show of hands” — it suddenly was a platform for beating the Ron Paul drum. That certainly wasn’t our intention and certainly doesn’t serve our readers … at least those who aren’t already in the Ron Paul camp.

I don’t know what Ron Paul’s über fanboys expect when they do stuff like this. Sure, they may get some momentary personal pleasure by throwing the results of an online poll, but all they are really doing is making their candidate look bad. Manipulating Internet polls just makes their candidate look weird. That’s something Ron Paul doesn’t need any help with.

He already has that down pat.