OBAMA TO BRING HIS INTERNET GOON SQUAD TO WASHINGTON

If a goose-stepper steps on the internet, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A powerful new lobbying force is coming to town: Barack Obama’s triumphant army of 3.1 million Internet-linked donors and volunteers.

In a mass e-mail thanking them, written moments before his Grant Park victory speech, Obama put them on notice. “We have a lot to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next,” he wrote.

Many are eager. “I’m going to be sitting at the phone, asking, ‘What do you want me to do next? I’m ready,’” said volunteer Courtney Hood, 37, a mother of three from Owings, Md.

How Obama will use his ardent laptop-armed cadres is unclear. So is the extent to which they’ll rally behind his priorities, press him for their own or both.

Joe Trippi, the Internet politics guru whose computer geeks made Howard Dean a contender in 2004 and who went on to design Obama’s socially networked campaign machine, offers a provocative and educated guess.

Trippi predicted that Obama would use his forces, first and foremost, to intimidate congressional foes of his agenda, rally his allies and forge “one of the most powerful presidencies in American history.”

As for political utility, many thousands of volunteers such as Hood will be deployable within hours, with great precision and at almost no cost, thanks to the campaign’s state-of-the-art information-management systems.

Of course, as we now know, many of these internet "donors and volunteers" are on foreign soil. So we now have the very real possibility of foreign citizens controlling our legislative branch of government. Don't think it can't happen. We never thought they could buy our election either.