Suddenly appearing among the Google search results for “sarah palin gay,” a web site titled: Sarah Palin Supports Gay Rights.

Sarah Palin (GOV-Alaska-Republican), supports gay rights, says Anchorage Daily News.

Quote “Gov. Sarah Palin vetoed a bill Thursday that sought to block the state from giving public employee benefits such as health insurance to same-sex couples.”

Quote “”It is the Governor’s intention to work with the legislature and to give the people of Alaska an opportunity to express their wishes and intentions whether these benefits should continue,“ the statement from Palin’s administration said.”

Coghill said he’s interested in a new plan that would allow state employees to designate one person — maybe a same-sex partner, but also possibly a family member or roommate — who would be eligible for state-paid benefits. But the employee would have to pay to add that person to his or her benefits.“

Sarah Palin’s veto gave gays the same rights as married couples in Alaska.

A vote for McCain/Palin is a vote for gay marriage.

Interesting. There’s nothing else on the page. This sure looks like the work of the dastardly right-wing anti-gay attack machine, doesn’t it?

But look who’s really behind this.

In the Linux console, if you enter the following commands, you can learn the secrets of a political dirty trick. First, look up the host of ‘sarahpalingayrights.com’ to get the site’s IP address.

host sarahpalingayrights.com
sarahpalingayrights.com has address 74.208.74.232

Then use the same command to look up the domain name pointer of that IP address.

host 74.208.74.232
232.74.208.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer obamadefense.com

Well, well. “Obamadefense.com,” eh?

And what happens if you enter obamadefense.com on your browser’s address line?

Why, you’re redirected to none other than FightTheSmears.com, the official Barack Obama site that’s supposed to be defending him against smears.

Looks like they may have a second purpose: to generate a few smears of their own.

(Hat tip: sk.)

UPDATE at 8/30/08 11:14:12 am:

Here’s another site that traces back to obamadefense.com: ObamaTaxCut.com.

UPDATE at 8/30/08 11:24:46 am:

Two more web sites that share the IP address of obamadefense.com:

John McCain opposes the new GI Bill, but why?
John McCain Prefers War

UPDATE at 8/30/08 12:39:29 pm:

Please note that this is not proof that the Obama campaign is behind this deceptive web site; that’s why the title ends with a question mark. But it’s definitely not what it seems.

UPDATE at 8/30/08 2:16:54 pm:

There is apparently no connection between these attack sites and the official Obama campaign; to get to the bottom of it I emailed the owner of an associated site, and here’s his reply:

I run ObamaTaxCut.com, or actually alchemytoday.com/obamataxcut

I think the person who registered the domain and forwarded traffic to it also owns/ran ObamaDefense.com — this used to be a separate site with short defenses of various factually inaccurate charges against Obama during the primary, but the owner changed it to redirect to Obama’s site after the campaign made one themselves.

UPDATE at 8/30/08 3:20:31 pm:

One last comment on this: the point still stands that it’s more than a little slimy to be a supporter of the “progressive” campaign of Barack Obama, then turn around and use Sarah Palin’s pro-gay rights positions against her in a creepy anonymous web site (that suddenly turns up highly placed on Google).

But this is one area in which Palin could actually appeal to many disgruntled Hilary supporters—so anything goes in the wonderful, tolerant world of the left.

UPDATE at 8/30/08 7:14:27 pm:

The ‘sarahpalingayrights.com’ site is now being redirected to Wikipedia.

UPDATE at 8/30/08 8:51:01 pm:

And now it’s being redirected to ObamaTaxCut.com.