This pains me deeply because I always thought -- from last February -- most of us made the migration here from our old home -- Hot Air -- and we were all getting settled in and point in our arrows and lances and spears outward toward an avowed common enemy: the abhorrent Frau Colostomy Bag and her vile henchpersons. But, alas, some diaper rash has manifested itself and this is my feeble attempt to anoint the irritated area with baby powder and oil.
If I stick my nose in and it is unwarranted then please excuse me.
Firstly, a recap of history through my aged orbs. Note that this may not square with the official HG history of events as used to be posted here. (Seems to be missing. Will amend this post if I find it.)
I first poked my head into the interwebs sometime in late 2003 during the election between "W" and the hapless, feckless John F-ing Kerry. I was delighted to find a centerpiece to CONSERVATIVE internet activity (circa 2003 definition) in the old, now departed "Blogs for Bush". Well, I was ancient (even in those days) and internet blogging was cool, hip, and the bomb. That we had our own voice back then, that we could meet, greet, and express our love for our principles and our intense enmity for our opponents back then absolutely sent electricity through my being.
The thing that bound us together was the commenting sections of posts almost literally to the point that we could care less what the the blog poster put up, we would just rage on and on in those threads. And this raw energy would spill over and have us looking for other sites with a similar political bent. It was then that I fell upon Hot Air and, though I was not registered and the site was closed, I was able to attract Ed Morrissey's attention via e-mail and, because he used to live in Cerritos, California and we were both ham radio operators and a few other trivialities, he allowed me to gain a coveted registration. (I may be bitter at Ed for the direction that Hot Air took and that he is a woeful #NeverTrumper, I cannot bring myself despise him and am forever grateful for that kindness. I still personally like Ed as a decent human being.)
So, I joined the family that was Hot Air and it is where I spent 99% of my time making friends and enemies. Famously, one of my favorite commenters at Hot Air was Schadenfreude with whom I got into a nasty disagreement that degenerated into a couple of F**K OFFs on both our parts. But later, we thought better of it, apologized to each other, and became the best of friends. I am so very sad he did not make the pilgrimage with us in February. I miss him terribly as I do rogerb, the archivist, who could dredge up embarrassing comments made by trolls from literally years in the past and throw them in the troll's face causing a crescendo of embarrassment. And also there was Del Dolmonte and his grading system and acre of sundials.
Then, some four years AFTER I took up with Hot Air, in 2009, I started blogging. (I still do. Won't give out the URL here. I do it mostly to vent and am happy I have the smallest hit count for any political blog on the internet. I do not give a fricasseed crap who reads it or who does not.)
I shared this and another blog (http://lcresistance.blogspot.com/) with several of my friends. And, as a matter of course, I essentially, gave the keys to the car to one guy who basically ran roughshod over the image I attempted to create. Succinctly, he was one of those guys now described as a Kruzlim -- a fanatic/purist re Ron Paul -- while I was just trying to unseat Obama, discredit him, and show the world what an incompetent fool he was. I hadn't wised up to NeoCons, the GOPe, globalists, or the other conspiracies that Trump has now flushed out of cover for us. Holy crap, give me a break! At the time, I was beginning to think that Mutt Rommel was the bees' elbows.
Anyway, his screeds grated on me until I finally relented and extricated myself from that sordid effort. (He later ran out of gas and absented himself from the site. I went in and cleaned up the mess but it was too late.)
So, I was with the old Hot Air crew for over a decade (2006 until now) and I made the migration when the guys here set up this nice place for us to drop in on.
Anyway, I prattle. But I there are four basic elements at play here:
Friendships and family. we cluster around these blogs because we essentially agree with one another and relationships develop and intensify. We literally become like family.
Change. Things change -- especially over decades -- and points of view and beliefs get sanded down, adjusted, and morph as time passes. How many of you honestly at one point or another liked John McCain or John Boehner or other Republicans because yiou believed they were a conservative bulwark against the leftists and liberals? Really? Weren't you at least a little bit relieved when we took back the House in that massive repudiation of 2010?
Blogging is hard. I do not wish to be dismissive but how many of you grate at your inability to express your feelings in writing? How many of you hate to write, period? And, how many of you would miss a ban on "embeds" because it's so much easier to just screen scrape some dippy tweet and call it a day?
Well, imagine what it's like having to scour the internet for breaking news or points of interest, compose them into human readable form, sprinkle them with attractive pictures, generally make them palatable, and suffuse them with just enough HTML to make them format-worthy, and then post them ON YOUR OWN BLOG. That's what the mods do here. They do it for free (except the ad and tip money which keeps HG a nearly break-even operaiton) and they DO have family, jobs, and lives.
We are guests. Which brings me to my final point. Any blog is like a neighbor's house not a restaurant or a bar. You can walk into a bar, track up trhe foyer and carpet with your muddy shoes, use the restroom and forget to flush, wipe up the drops, and/or leave the toilet seat up. But, I guara-damn-tee you that you cannot pull that in the War Planner household and get invited back. Same here at Hot Gas.
So, here it is summed up. The mods here busted their ass to put HG on the air and a lot of the cementers "made the jump" over to HG. We were an unruly lot and righteously pissed off when The Pillsbury Doughboy (Ed) pulled the plug on the regular commenting system. We felt like we were the poor relations getting thrown out on the street when Chrome Dome (Ed) jilted us; we felt like, by virtue of longevity, we had skin in the game. In fact, only Ed and Michelle and Allah (God crap upon him) threw into the pot. We were just visitors, guests in their house, if you will.
The HG you are reading and commenting on comes down to the present day from roots that were in the earliest of conservative blogging. The guys running the show here are keepers of a sacred flame steeped in tradition.
Sure there are other blogs. BB has a lot of luster and they are -- as Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction says -- the "Pipe hittin' Ni**as" of the conservative/Trump blogdom. But you ever dropped a comment into that voracious maw and watch it disappear into the maelstrom? It's like having an intimate conversation with 100,000 others at the NCAA College Football championship game! (Because NO ONE watches the NFL anymore, yo!)
WeaselZippers is good but it's another family, not ours. Besides, WZ's posts are no more that screen scrapes of the first few graphs and a single line witticism. Nothing wrong with it, but HG's Headlines are done much more masterfully than that. And out posts -- while over 400 words -- are well written and worth our interest.
And, God love Jim Hoft over at GWP, but his posts are scintillating flash but a cacophony of hash tags that are sometimes tantalizingly undecipherable.
CTH is noble but scant. It's one guy pulling the whole load with an open thread every twenty minutes. Day in..day out.
ZeroHedge does really good work but the commenting is too arcane and cliquish. (Gotta admit, for all its faults, Disqus offers the "Edit" button and terrific pan-site indexing.)
Yada. Yada. Don't even get me started on those constipated sites like The Other McStain and, of course, our old elephant burial ground, Dear Air. And there's Red State, Ass of Spades, and the other #NT sites. I'd rather have relations with MeAgain Kelly, get an STD and have my winky leak like dripping faucet.
Naw, mate. the lads have a prime location here and, with promo and a good following, it can get its hits amped. (Says the owner of a veritable "one hit wonder" site.) By the way, I make it a point to at least once per day take a HG post URL with me and drop it on WZ, BB, GWP, or elsewhere. Figure it's doing my part for the cause. Besides, I am proud of the work that my homies do here, yo.
So, we are the mods' guests and we are part of a family that WE have all assembled -- whether we made the migration or are newcomers -- and we should have an underlying respect for one another. It's quite enough to have quarrels; families do that. But, like me and Schadenfreude, we are all good friends underneath it all..
..and our enemies are far more scarier that the members of our family are.
Sorry for the lecture. Just my point of view. It is how I plan on treating each of you -- mod or cementer -- and how I would like to be treated in return.
The War Planner
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