(Screencap: Patriot Voices)

It's not often that we feel the desire to head over to Patriot Voices, the website of former Presidential candidate and uber-conservative Rick Santorum that serves up partisan vitriol with every click. But a post on Reddit about Mr. Santorum caught our eye and the claim checks out.

When you navigate to Patriot Voices, a pop up box appears with a bunch of different people’s faces alongside Mr. Santorum’s, ostensibly representing patriots, which by his definition likely refers to fellow sweater vest wearers. One of those pictures, sandwiched in between two photos of Mr. Santorum, is the visage of Chris Poole–a.k.a. Moot, the founder of notorious message board 4chan. The photo is the same one used on Mr. Poole's Wikipedia page.

Prominently featuring a photo of “the 20-year-old at the heart of the web’s most anarchic and influential site” on a Santorum site has to be the most inspired web design trolling (or fuck up!) we've seen in awhile. But how did it happen?

Patriot Voices used the startup Nation Builder, a web tool kit for community organizers, as a platform for the site. A representative for Nation Builder told Betabeat that the site was designed by an outside designer at the Pittsburgh-based political consulting and advertising firm Brabender Cox.

Like, what? (Screencap: Patriot Voices)

Dubbed "the premier Republican spin doctors," Brabender Cox has a longstanding history of working to promote Republican candidates. In addition to doing work for Mr. Santorum, they've also created viral videos and advertising content for politicians like Republican Senator Tom Coburn and Republican Mayor of Indianapolis Greg Ballard.

It's hard to believe that anyone working at such a well-established Republican media arm would be outwardly anti-Santorum (unless they contracted out the job to a secret Dem). We've reached out to the designer to clarify. We've also reached out to Moot to ask for his reaction.

It's still unclear whether the designers, say, mistook Moot for your average wholesome looking white guy. What is clear, however, is that it is fucking hilarious.

Update:

Adrian Chen reports that Moot told him: "...somebody knows how to use Wikipedia, I guess. I assumed someone created a profile on the site and used my photo as their profile pic. Or maybe it was a staffer/designer for the site. Who knows."

One kind of Santorum.

Remember when a mischievous sex columnist Google-bombed Rick Santorum in order to associate the then-U.S. Senator with a neologism for an anal sex byproduct in retaliation for Mr. Santorum's comments against homosexuality? Perhaps you don't, because it was almost nine years ago. And in that amount of time, the second search result on both Google and Bing is still spreadingsantorum.com, which features a splash page with the definition of the term as "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex" and a frequently-updated blog about the man himself.

How did Mr. Santorum's staff let this public relations crisis go on for so long? How many Santorum supporters have had their heads explode before they could even make a donation?

The campaign isn't helping itself much, writes search engine guru Danny Sullivan, who notes that the campaign has replaced the homepage of the site with a splash page asking for donations that forces readers to jump to a new page before they can learn anything about the presidential candidate. As a result, his campaign page doesn't even make the first page of Bing and searches for things like how to volunteer with the campaign redirect to the donation page. Many of the site's pages redirected to the donation form.

Thanks for the free advice, Mr. Santorum's campaign responded tacitly; they abolished the redirects only four hours after Mr. Sullivan wrote about them (creating a few errors in the process). Nine years after the Google bombing, and Mr. Santorum hadn't hired any SEO experts to tell him this kind of stuff?

Of course, blog posts like this one don't help.