David Flynn13 January 2009, 1:00 PM
An online ‘farewell card’ for George W Bush is bogged down by abusive emails from the Middle East.
There appear to be no fond farewells as George W Bush enters the final week of his presidency. A Web site set up for fans to leave a note of thanks for his two terms in office has been swamped by abusive messages, mostly from the Middle East and all of them glad to see Bush leave the White House.
ByeDubya.com has clocked up 145,000 messages in the past week, and is still taking an average of 100 new messages every hour, but few are complimentary. Indeed, most of them can’t even be published onto the Web because the site’s owners say they are “totally obscene”.
Sadia Chishti, who oversees the ByeDubya site, told
The Telegraph that “there's some very creative swearing happening in these messages. People are taking a lot of time to put together elaborate messages, but many are totally obscene and cannot be printed.”
An estimated 82% of all messages have been traced back to Internet addresses emanating from the Middle East, Chishti says. “Most of the remaining messages are from the UK, USA, Australia and Japan. There are a lot of negative messages in those, but at least the majority are clean.”
The notion behind the Web site is that all approved messages will be used to create a giant mosaic picture of Bush which will be posted to the White House. Based on the past week, however, this could turn out to be no larger than a postcard.