Getting Pap Smeared (and not liking it even a little)

Sorry about the title, but I'm in a vile mood.  Why?  Well, glad you asked. 

Between 5:45 AM and 6:15AM when I would have loved to have been writing a post and reading the news, I ended up having to delete several hundred spam comments, as well as having to add the spammer's IP ranges to my ban list.

I've mentally dubbed this particular attack 'The Pap Smear' because 99% of the bogus names on the spam comments started with 'Pap...' (e.g. Papskis3ud, Papxcs5s, Papzqu&dy, etc.).

This is the second time in as many weeks that treppenwitz has come under attack from this source and my hosting service's filters seem incapable of shielding me.

I honestly don't know what the goal of these spammers could possible be.  I mean, if they're selling something, nobody is going to take out their credit card after taking a gander at the spam site's garbled syntax and random sentence structure. 

If they're trying to jam up servers or deny service to the sites they are attacking, the volume is well below that threshold.

So what is it?  What is their goal???

It obviously takes a certain level of technical sophistication to program the 'bots' that identify target sites and send out the comment and track-back spam.  It also requires at least a minimal investment in equipment (despite the fact that they often hijack unsuspecting computers to do their bidding) to mount these attacks.

So, other than being disruptive and destructive, I just don't understand what the percentage is in being a spammer!

Enlightenment please.