Earlier this week we got two (two!) Newsweek articles detailing the latest Obama campaign flap, a potentially damaging gaffe concerning the unethical use of a fax machine. Turns out the secretly secret contents of the unethically unethical fax included…well, nothing really that scandalous. But politics of the nitty-gritty is FUN!

And now comes MySpaceGate, perhaps the greatest net “flap” of the netroots era. Ben Smith has a series of posts up at Politico painstakingly detailing what went down:

Barack Obama has apparently convinced MySpace (owned by News Corp.) to shut down his own unofficial MySpace page — without the consent of its creator — and re-direct its traffic to a new official page.

The dispute, according to the creator of the unofficial page, was in large part about money. He wanted to get paid for his work.

Smith goes on to clarify that MySpace routinely drops fan sites from their main URL if the artists/band/actor/politician asks them to do so, and that the creator of the page was looking for roughly $50,000 for the domain squatting blood, sweat and tears that went into his MySpacing.

So MySpaceGate: nothing more than a petty social networking non-issue? Or a dangerously illuminating political scandal requiring full campaign damage control?

As one commenter offers up:

MySpaceGate is just the latest in a series of rookie mistakes by Obama…if these blunders are any indication, his decision making process doesn’t seem to rise to the level that is required of a President.

There you have it: if you can’t maintain your official MySpace presence without offending fellow MySpace denizens then, well, you just aren’t fit to lead this country.

Which provokes a thought: With every presidential candidate now creating MySpace profiles, will our next president, like, totally be on MySpace?

Thanks for the add, Mr. Leader of the Free World! Check out my new track; it’s the metaphysical cosmic introspection of OK Computer meets the wanton isolation of Joss Stone going down on The Gulag Orkestar. FOUR MORE YEARS!