BUSH-WHACKER

At the beginning of April, I received a mass e-mail soliciting support for
the George W. Bush Presidential Exploration Committee and referring me to
its Web site: (http://www.gwbush.com).

I never even went to the site. Instead, I replied directly to the
"Committee." I noted that I'd consider voting for the younger Bush "around
the same time the Bush family announces their conversion to Islam."

When I received a reply that afternoon stating that "We have converted to
Islam, here at the Presidential Exploratory Committee!" I had an inkling
that something was screwy. Either I had just been duped, or the Bush
family's devotion to winning over every voter was stronger than I'd thought.

It turns out that the site is the brainchild of one Zack Exley, a
29-year-old computer programmer and University of Massachusetts graduate
student, and run under the auspices of the creative corporate sabotage
collective ®TMark (pronounced "art-mark"). Exley and ®TMark were having fun
toying with the gullible hordes -- such as yours truly -- who hadn't caught
on to the joke yet.

I was hooked.

Last December, Exley noticed that the governor's Presidential Exploratory
Committee had reserved the Internet address (www.georgewbush.com) -- but
had neglected to acquire the rights to (www.gwbush.com). ("G.W. Bush" is
George Dubyuh's other preferred name, his way of saying, "Don't confuse me
with my daddy.") So, $210 later, Exley became the proud owner of the
Internet addresses (http://www.gwbush.com), (http://www. gwbush.org) and
(http://www.gbush.org).

Go to any of these sites today -- the latter two just load up the
gwbush.com page -- and it's clear that an alternative-universe G.W. Bush
candidacy is unfolding. In this candidacy, Bush (who in real life has all
but admitted using cocaine in his "youth") owns up to his years of youthful
abandon and applies to his drug-crime policy the same forgiving standards
he now expects from voters. (See accompanying story.) Here's a tip, though:
The candidate's proposed "Amnesty 2000" program won't be found anywhere but
at gwbush.com.

And, as long as gwbush.com is not violating any copyrights surrounding the
georgewbush.com site, there's little to stand in the way of Exley's pointed
satire.

The Bush campaign moved quickly to make sure it didn't happen again. Soon
after Exley's Web site appeared, the campaign bought 260 other potential
Bush-related Internet addresses. Some names were understandable choices for
a campaign trying to secure every possible remaining George W. Bush-related
name, such as Bush2000.org. On the other hand, some of the campaign's
purchases were downright weird -- "bushsux.org" and "bushblows.com" --
leading one to suppose that Bush's advisers felt their job (however
shortsighted and, ultimately, impossible) was to silence all criticism on
the Internet, not just satirical Web sites that could be mistaken for the
real thing.

Initially, the Bush campaign claimed its domain-name buying frenzy happened
in the summer of 1998 and thus had nothing to do with Exley's venture. But
after purchase records came to light that contradict this claim -- the 260
additional names were registered two months after Exley secured gwbush.com
- -- it became clear that Bush HQ had been inordinately obsessed with the
homemade Web site of a twentysomething gadfly.

First Bush's handlers sent Exley a threatening legal letter. Then they
filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission, trying to force
Exley to register as a political action committee. The complaint is pending.

Seizing on this strange tale of cybernetic cat and mouse, the media have
been building the gwbush.com vs. georgewbush.com story. After prominent
coverage in online newspapers (including The New York Times and USA Today
and ABCNews.com) during May, Exley reports that gwbush.com saw "hundreds of
thousands" of visitors. During the same period, the official George W. Bush
Web site received fewer than 10,000.

"It's as if I had a major publication that had a monthly circulation of
almost a million people for the month of May," says Exley.

Initially, gwbush.com was a favorite of a few hundred people around the
world who had somehow caught wind of the prank Web site and had e-mailed
the link to a friend or two. If the brain trust at georgewbush.com had
played the game with any sense of strategy, this is where we would still be
today. They'd be ignoring the little kid off in the boonies who's thumbing
his nose at the big, ugly, corporate-funded political campaign. This is
precisely the tactic Bob Dole's 1996 campaign applied to dole96.com, a
parody of the official dole96.org site.

"It's not like people were typing in gwbush.com on their own in droves,"
Exley now muses. "It was getting a trickle of a very small number of visits
every day. There was no chances of me having this as a forum. The only
thing I could hope for was to piss off Bush a little bit and sell him the
names."

He tried to do the latter in April, after the Bush campaign sent him a
cease-and-desist letter. At the time, Exley was running a copy of
georgewbush.com on his site -- and flouting copyright laws in the process.

"So I took it down," Exley says. "I didn't want to get sued for a copyright
[violation]. I wouldn't mind if they sued me for libel. Because I think
Bush did do coke, and I'd love to have him on the stand, and have a lawyer
ask him under oath if he did coke or not. Then I'd be the Paula Jones of
the Bush campaign. ...

"Really what cracks me up about this whole thing is that they're spending
all this time on it. When I got the first copyright letter, I could not
believe it. I thought, 'My God. These people are idiots. Here they think
they're going to get this guy in as president, and they're responding to
this little satirical Web site.' It's ridiculous."

Bush himself went on the offensive against gwbush.com, calling Exley a
"garbage man" in one press conference and informing reporters that he
thinks "there should be limits to freedom" -- an authoritarian utterance
that's now featured prominently on Exley's site (he's selling T-shirts and
bumper stickers bearing the quotation) and may come back to haunt Bush
later in the campaign.

In its FEC complaint against Exley, the Bush campaign argues that he is
acting as a political action committee and thus must follow FEC rules for
PACs2E To wit: The Web site should state clearly who runs it, and Exley
should disclose the amount of money he spends on the site.

In his defense, Exley notes that he's not advocating for or against
candidates; he's using the presidential race as a vehicle to get people
talking about the drug war. His site does, after all, also link to three Al
Gore parody Web sites: (http://www.allgore.com), (http://www.albore.com)
and (http://www. nogore.com). Nonetheless, Exley is considering registering
as a political action committee.

As with its previous attempts to silence him, the Bush campaign's FEC ploy
has further focused attention on Exley. CNN interviewed him just last week
for a story on the dispute, he reports.

The attention Bush has brought to gwbush.com has elated Exley. His site may
now become a bona fide political force -- albeit a scrappy, underdog one.
"If they had sent me an e-mail saying, 'Hey, you know, we'd like to buy
these names from you for a few thousand bucks,' I would have sold them,"
Exley admits. "Because what was I going to do with them? Nobody was
visiting the site. But then when I got the [cease-and-desist] letter, I
thought, 'These people are stupid. They're freaking out about control over
the whole World Wide Web. They don't understand how this works. They don't
understand that if they start attacking this Web site, it's going to get a
lot of attention.' So when they asked me how much I was going to sell the
Web site for, I said $350,000. I knew they weren't going to sell for that.
It was just a tongue-in-cheek response."

The Bush campaign, of course, didn't cut any six-figure checks for Exley.
Now that the campaign has created such an ideal forum, though, Exley states
flatly that gwbush.com is not for sale.

Bush's alleged drug use raises a number of important questions about the
War on Drugs -- or "War on Justice," as Exley calls it. The thousands who
visit gwbush.com daily will continue to be exposed to those questions,
which their televisions and radios may not be asking.

Exley is now thinking about an ad campaign in New Hampshire during next
year's primary season. The ads would ask both Bush and Vice President Al
Gore, the Democratic front-runner, if they can truly support the War on
Drugs given their own histories (admitted or alleged) with illegal substances.

"The stakes are high," Exley says. "We're talking about hundreds of
thousands of people in jail for no good reason. Tens of thousands of these
people were not even drug users -- they're girlfriends of drug users or
mothers of drug users. And the other ones -- the drug users themselves --
they need treatment. We don't have enough beds to treat people."

The ad campaign, he says, could include "putting up a billboard with Gore
admitting to smoking pot and then a kid who got 20 years for smoking pot.
And put them next to each other -- and say, 'Mr. Gore, Mr. Bush: Do you
think this kid should be in jail?' We'll pick three poster-child cases of
somebody who's completely innocent and in jail for 20 years, somebody who
did a minor drug crime and is in for life, and somebody who had their house
and car and life savings taken away because of the forfeiture laws. ...
Suppose we go film the mother of some kid who used coke a few times and now
is in jail for 10 years. And we have her asking Bush to tell her whether he
did drugs or not. That'd be a significant thing."

While he hasn't started raising money yet, "a lot of drug law reform and
human rights groups are interested in doing these kinds of ads too," Exley
says.

Thanks to the platform that George Dubyuh and his people have built for
Exley, the next year may actually shed some light on the "War on Justice."
So long as Bush continues to obsess over his Lilliputian critics, those
with a little more savvy will continue to twist the rope around his ankles.

Exley sees an opportunity to turn his forum into a miniature nationwide
referendum. "This could really change a lot of things in politics," he
says. "Right now corporations can raise a lot of money. And it's easy for
them to organize big blocks of donations. But it's not easy for ordinary
people to organize big blocks of donations. This is going to make it so
that issues that people on the Web really care about are going to get
funded. Nobody cares about funding Gore's campaign. Nobody cares about
funding Bush's campaign. But they care about these kinds of issues.
Somebody who's got a family member in jail, which is like half the country,
can click through and contribute to this cause."