Putting aside politics briefly, I would say the general lesson here is that anything that anyone posts on the internet, broadly defined (even including private e-mail) has the capability of going not only public but viral, so that one should always consider that remote possibility whenever one posts. The law is still evolving on this, but so far the standard seems to be that if Joe Blow or Wide Sally Wide post a random thought in some dark corner of the intertubes, it has the same power to reach a mass audience as if Wolf Blitzer had said it with that odd guy pointing at each word on a 3-d mockup, or the NYT had published it on their op-ed page, or the Dalai Lama had spoken it at the United Nations.
The upside is that we are now all virtually famous even if we don’t know about it.
I agree. The crazies whose rants were once confined within the walls of gin mills, opium dens, basements, prisons or psychiatric hospitals can now broadcast their lunacy to a planet-wide audience!