We won! Sorta! After we complained about the annoyingness of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and the media trend of finding it surprising that he is right-wing (he is a CEO), Mackey stepped down as Chairman of Whole Foods.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is everywhere! Why? Because he owns a hippie grocery store chain, is himself hippieish, and also he is a conservative libertarian dude! That makes the things he has to say newsworthy!

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, was recently caught trash-talking competitor Wild Oats on various Internet forums under the name Rahodeb, an anagram of his wife's name. Not so long ago, critic Lee Siegel posed as an anonymous commenter beneath his own essays and brought himself to shame. And now we have our own story of greed, deception, regret and Pinkberry with our commenter named Dave Craig. Soon after the Mackey story broke, we got an email from Craig asking that we remove all his comments. What an odd request, we thought. Then we thought a little more. And Googled.

After initially insisting he'd done nothing wrong, Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey has apologized for posting messages about his company and the competition under the pseudonym "Rahodeb." Most people are celebrating the reversal. But I'm kicking myself. I should have known. I, of all people, should have known.

Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey is not the only person using a fictional identity online to fluff his ego and advance his business aims. The New York Times refers to the practice as sock-puppeting , "the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one's self, allies or company." It provides several examples of executives, writers, politicos, and bloggers whose alter egos ultimately caught up with them. Most notable is conspiracy theorist and CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick M. Byrne.

The "Rahodeb" incident, in which Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey was caught touting his company's stock on Yahoo Finance message boards, is not the first time Mackey has shown extremely poor judgment when it comes to the Internet. Around the same time he started posting on Yahoo Finance as "Rahodeb," a handle taken from the name of his wife, Deborah Morin, he launched a dotcom called WholePeople, which turned out to be an out-and-out disaster, as I wrote back in 2000. But as I reported that story, I also heard persistent rumors that there was a lot of sleeping around going on at Whole Foods, starting at the top. Sounds like the kind of thing we approve of. In most cases. But not the way Mackey did it. Here's why:

John Mackey, the eccentric chief executive of flabbergastingly expensive grocery chain Whole Foods Market, has been exposed, the Wall Street Journal reports, for posting comments on Yahoo Finance message boards cheerleading himself and the company he co-founded, and bashing then-competitor Wild Oats. How long has this gone on? Eight years, which is plenty of time for him, in theory, to boost Whole Foods' stock price and dent Wild Oats' enough so that his company could take over its rival, in a deal that's now drawing scrutiny from the government. Illegal? Who knows. Arrogant, narcissistic, foolish, and compulsive? You bet, and that's why we love it.