It appears that Winner & Associates and/or key employees and/or associates thereof (Ethan Winner, Charles Winner aka Chuck Winner) have been caught red-handed trying to make a Youtube video containing a lie about Sarah Palin go viral. If I were a corporate client of Winner & Associates or even of their parent company Publicus Groupe, this is one of those things that would make my skin crawl.

Lying in order to support Barack Obama is one thing, but getting caught at it is something very, very different. Not only that, but despite all their apparent best efforts to smear Palin, their video was only able to get several thousands of views. That, to me, screams incompetence.

If you were ExxonMobil, Petronas, ChevronTexaco, or Bioengineering Resources International (BRI) [1], Shell Solar, or the Lockheed Corporation [2] how would you feel right now? Of course, I don't suggest contacting those companies and letting them know what Winner and Associates has apparently been up to, but if those companies ever decided to stoop as low as Winner & Associates apparently has, how would they like to get caught at it? They'd need to hire another PR firm in order to clean up the mess caused by their first one.

[1] winnerandassociates.com/portfolio/websites01.htm et seq.
[2] winnerandassociates.com/portfolio/training01.htm et seq.

UPDATE: Here's something interesting: within a short time of posting this, I got a visit to this page from Covington & Burling, a Washington DC law firm. That's according to Sitemeter's reverse DNS, and I haven't yet checked my server logs for the IPs that have visited this page since I posted it. However, that might prove interesting.

Especially because of this:

[Barack Obama] also has accepted tens of thousands from partners Covington & Burling, which was paid nearly a half-million dollars last year to lobby for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, or PhRMA. None of the donations came from three partners at the firm who worked as PhRMA lobbyists.

And this:

Covington partner Eric Holder Jr. is a close adviser to Obama, and a member of his vice presidential search team.

UPDATE 2: Ethan Winner takes one for the team, claiming sole personal responsibility for the video.