Freepin' wingers

The future is unknown,* but for the moment, C-PAC is a gathering of fringe crazies, and the subject of near-infinite hilarious posts by snarky bloggers, like here for example. If you follow that kind of stuff, you're seeing a lot of forms of freep these days. That's a blend, from Free Republic, the classic tinfoil hat crowd on-line, as suggested already by this google search result:

Both the Obama 'birth certificate' issue AND the 'homosexual agenda'. Isn't that a scream? Of course it's more than a little scary to think that they could have real power, so I laugh only nervously.

But I knew freep and its derivational family only as negative terms. Most common, in my experience, is freeper, synonym for wingnut, etc. But the verb is out there too, as here:

To slew [skew? V] or cheat an online poll by repeatedly voting (clearing cookies, using proxies) or to make a blog appear to be commented by numerous posters by the same means. (From the practices of the Free Republic or "freepers")

The results of the CNN question of the day were running 70:30 in favor until an hour ago when it got freeped.

What surprised me was seeing that the FreeRepublic website actually uses the term, with the variant spelling FReeper. Somehow, that's worse, because it evokes 'reaper' and thus 'grim' for me.

*That is …