Welcome to the mysterious wiki-war against Jeanne Shaheen

On July 2, 2007, new accounts appeared at Wikipedia, Wikiquote, and Sourcewatch under the names "Nhdem" and "Nhdem2". All three accounts worked only on Jeanne Shaheen articles--in fact, Jeanne Shaheen didn't have an article in Wikiquote until Nhdem created one. All changes made to Jeanne Shaheen's bio focused on her statements in 2002 expressing support for "regime change" in Iraq and Bush's tax cuts.

These statements have been pulled out of her 2002 campaign for the US Senate, where she campaigned as a centrist Democrat running on environmental and social issues, including abortion rights and opposition to privatizing Social Security.

At the time Shaheen made these statements, September 11, 2001 was a recent memory. Bush's claims that Iraq had WMD and close ties to Osama Bin Laden were widely believed. Bush's claims that wide tax cuts would serve as a job-generating machine were also widely believed. Both the Bush tax cuts and the Congressional vote to let Bush use force against Iraq had majority support from Democrats in Congress.

Jeanne Shaheen is a potential candidate for the US Senate seat currently held by John Sununu (R-NH). There are also several other NH Democrats who have strong supporters.

Nhdem seems to be working to turn "progressive" Democrats away from Shaheen. Is Nhdem in fact a progressive NH Democrat? Or is Nhdem also the person behind a new YouTube account called "ShaheenSpeaks", a YouTube account with exactly the same goals, a YouTube account that may be associated with an IP address in Washington, DC that was the first to link to it from Wikipedia, as the Concord Monitor suggests. [1]. Washington DC Republicans have a busy history of trying to create bad feeling between NH progressives and centrist Democrats, as witness their longterm efforts to help Ralph Nader.

I'm not sure what to do about this, but it seems to me that this is a misuse of Wikiquote. Betsythedevine 19:42, 2 August 2007 (UTC)Reply