What's that smell? I think it's GOATSE and HOOBASTANK

You'd have to have absolutely zero presence on Web2.0 these days — or, as I like to call it, "living in your luddite hole" — to not know what's been going on in Iran. Simply put, either leading mullahs or president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stuffed ballot boxes and manipulated the vote, resulting in his reelection, sweeping electoral fraudulence, and millions of Iranian citizens taking to the streets to champion reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi.

The response from government forces has been swift and brutal. People are being beaten on the streets by the moral police, the secret police and the regular police. They're being beaten by people who aren't even police. Meanwhile, others are being kidnapped, driven out of buildings and harassed into silence. The only way we know this, the only way we know anything important anymore these days, is because of Twitter.

You see, thousands of Iranian protesters, activists and regular citizens have, instead of takin' it to the streets, been takin' it to the Tweeps, tweeting away the latest injustices, uploading video and photos and GETTING THE WORD OUT.

Unfortunately, they've been getting their word out on the INTERNET, perennial home of the miscreant, the basement-dweller, the person who stores his semen in a 16-oz. bottle of Gamer Fuel because he can't be bothered to stop raiding WoW even long enough to jerk off into a toilet. These misfits — the misbegotten, misinformed and misanthropic — have been fighting the cause of democracy with degeneracy. For, you see, just as suffering Iranians have been trying to tweet critical messages that could mean life or death, light or a dearth of it in the rest of the world as to the crisis in Iran, these knaves of the keyboard have been tweeting back GOATSE.

Flooding the #iranelections and #tehran tweet threads with disguised link after disguised link, these people seek to disrupt the cause of liberty with libertinism. Because now people are afraid to click links. Dreading the "Goatass" as they call it, innocent people committed to aiding Farsi freedom fighters are shying away from information that could prove critical in hours or only minutes. Under the yearning nethermaw of The Goatman, his afteye black as Sauron's, the good ship of citizen journalism founders on the rocks of distrust and disinformation. Because, if these people will disguise their links thus, what else might they disguise? Might it be falsehood? Falsehood that can get someone killed?

Who I believe is responsible may surprise you, because one of the worst purveyors of these malicious links has been Twitter user "Hoobastank Band," in what appears to be a sickening publicity stunt for an upcoming show.

Why would Hoobastank do this? Well, Wikipedia tells me that this band calls itself post-grunge, but it may be fair to call them post-relevant, since no one of any discernment I've ever met — which is to say, the people I would voluntarily associate with — has ever assaulted my cochleae with their offending din. Also, consider just their name alone. Hoobastank, as you'd doubtless concur, is an urban term. Yet look at how little visual evidence there is that they have any African-American roots. Worse, the trivialities they offer as "music" denote how little introspection they must possess as people, indicating that they've never made the effort to identify with the Black Experience in America as I and many of my colleagues have.

Maychance this "trolling" of a humanitarian nightmare is Hoobastank's feeble and flaccid stab at urban cred[ibility], their attempt at the derogatory African-American call-and-response tradition of "The Dozens" — e.g., "Yo' democracy so weak, it got less integrity than the Goatman's O-ring."

I think that if anything here is weak, it is the non-gentlemen of Hoobastank, who are spreading their "stank" all over an essential tool of political upheaval, sabotaging the fundamental web-interconnectivity of millions of freedom fighters in their hour of maximum danger, as they near their hour of maximum triumph.