Absurdly Irresponsible Wingnut Blogging

Gone

Apparently a list of Swift Boat Veterans was left in a comment in August 2004 by a commenter who no longer visits these pages anymore. It languished there for almost two years unread, and unnoticed by anyone until some enterprising soul found it and said list made its way to the Huffington Post (comments, apparently).

A right-wing blogger has made it his quest to have me remove the list (which in all honesty I had not even remembered being there) or he is threatening to out me and my family. Well, I am not a big fan of outing anyone for any reason. The Swift Boat folks have their right to speak, as do I and Mr. Stogie Chomper, and they don't deserve to be threatened for their political views, just as I don't nor does anyone else. Period.

Bottom line: I deleted those comments as soon as I found them off a link from The American Spectator. Had Mr. Stogie Chomper given me the link, they would have been gone sooner. Had anyone pointed it out, I probably would have deleted them long ago...anyone who is a long time reader will remember that once-upon-a-time, there was not comment moderation here and I'm guessing that list might have been posted back then, which is why I did not remember it.

I certainly would have like to have known before now that I was causing all these problems. I am only too happy to have deleted the information. I don't know where the commenter got it, but it seemed to have been off a list of some sort, it was pretty well organized.

List gone, problem solved, I hope. Never meant to be the cause of such bother and worry.

Peace.

I approve (and hope Joe doesn't object to my quoting the entire post to keep it in context.)  Maybe he should have fought fire with fire, escalated . . . but to what end?

Because he's better than that!  Just like America is better with people like him.  Because when we act in accordance with the best of our ideals, we personify the best of American Exceptionalism.  Because he realizes that the most important limits emanate from self-restraint.

Our nation is led by poster children for ugly America; brought to power by the vacuous delinquents who play with people's personal lives like schoolyard bullies.  However, our free society deemed it prudent to put restraints on the very power we usurped from Mother England.  The founders understood the value of self-restraint.  The institution that enabled the most radical right-wing clique to gain the Presidency by a 5 to 4 margin, and the other branch which has rubber-stamped so much of their agenda, also must be counted on to eventually curb their excesses.  And that, in a nutshell, is the significance of Hamden case.

Bill Keller and Dean Banquet put it so much better than what I could ever hope to (which is why they get paid for their writing and telling their world-class staffs what and how to write.

But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

Joe Fish, Keller and Banquet understand self-restraint.  They understand that such grown-up responsibility exemplifies what makes us better than those who would urge violence against the innocent or people just doing their jobs.  They know it's just plain wrong.

It's one thing to disagree with your fellow Americans, quite another to personally target private citizens for harassment or violence.  We are suposed to be in this thing together.  Malkin and her ilk just don't get that.