The Great eBay WMD Auction began Friday night at 9p.m. EST, one year after the bombs started to fall on Baghdad. "Everyone else was making money off of this fraudulent war, so I figured why shouldn't I cash in on a fraud of my own," is how David (my older and questionably wiser brother) later described his inspiration for this.

The auction started off rather modestly and had tallied up about 45 hits by Saturday evening with a winning bid of about $2.50....not a bad price for weapons of mass destruction that don't exist. I called David in Alaska and asked him just how much exposure he wanted this auction to have because if he wanted, I could fan the flames a little bit.

Having a green light, I created this discussion thread on Democratic Underground. I started the thread at 9:13 p.m. Saturday night, and by 9:44 the auction had 150 hits and a high bid of $88.00. After another twenty minutes, the high bid was at $5100.00. The auction broke the 10K mark at 10:37, and at 12:23a.m. the price hit $27,755. If you don't believe me, look at the screenshot that I saved.

It was pretty amazing to watch all this happening in real time, and I went to bed wondering if I'd be awoken by an unamused FBI breaking down my door since I had bid on the auction. Didn't happen, but I did wake up at 4a.m. with my right arm completely asleep, it was just flopping around like rubber, and I had that momentary thought of, "What if it's been like this for a couple of hours and it's just dead now?" but then the feeling started to come back.

As you could have probably guessed, eBay was either tipped off or they found the auction on their own, but it was cancelled at 4:45 early Sunday morning. At the time, the high bid was around $28K. So nobody won the WMD that they were promised not to receive.

As proof that the internet can quickly make a celebrity out of anyone, David received a call early Sunday from a Los Angeles talk-radio show asking him if he'd like to go on the air and talk about his auction. He was a little skeptical, but the host assured David that the show was the token left-wing program. So for five minutes yesterday, he was on the air explaining the reason why he held the auction, part of which he said, "I was just looking for a way to get mentioned on my brothers blog, yourlogohere.blogspot.com."
As of last night, David had not been detained by the Department of Homeland Security as an enemy combatant, but we haven't given up hope quite yet.