August 04, 2005

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

Humpday, 8 Sweltring (Wedmath) 2005

We have been looking at a few sites that are not on our usual journey through the Fashionable Left Bank of Blogistan, and we have been able to find that small ray of sunshine that helps us get through the daily slog during our detour. We'd like to tell you all about it in a minute.

But first, we'd like to point out one of the delays in our journey that has caused us to be a little bit late in getting to visit most of the rest of you of late. We were really happy to hear that one of our good cyberfriends, The suburban Guerrilla, was now among the ranks of the employed, and could, like, you know, buy things she needed to survive, and try and get a little less debt attached to her Homeland Security profile. we were also hoping that we could catch up on all of our other site visitations, now that we were stopping over at Susie's for a virtual cup of coffee, and not much else.

Well, Susie lasted all of two days working for the man. It probably didn't help that she was getting told to lie to customers, and do pretty much everything she could to drive those paying customers away, by her superior(s). And it definitely didn't help when, as soon as she tossed the script she got from the management and started treating the customers honestly, she started to see positive results. Having to compete for the job with temps and being undermined in her efforts on a constant basis wasn't the biggest incentive to continue the gig, either.

So the long and the short of that tale is: it has taken us much longer than we anticipated to wade through all of the bloggy goodness over in that neck of the woods. Which, when added to our extra stops on our journey, has caused infotainment overload in our overtaxed synapses. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Okay - back to our original ramblings. Since we have assumed the duties of administrator for the Truth Laid Bear BBA community, we've been wandering down a few paths that we have, until now, chosen to avoid. You know the ones- they usually seem to meander all over the place, but invariably they end up at InstaCracker's front door. Or to FReeperville or other less wholesome places.

However, we have been somewhat pleasantly surprised to find vestiges of sanity amongst the moderate conservatives out there. It seems to us that some of those unquestioning conservabots have had some glitches in their programming. And they don't seem to be all that inclined to have their more ideologically pure brethren lead them back to Putschworld.

Take the Politburo Diktat, for example. In the last few days we have read about Free tuition for National Guardsmen, some disapproval of El Chupa Cabra's characterization of Paul Hackett as a staff puke, and some criticism of Drinky McDumbAss and his viewpoints on how to edumacate our chilluns. We have to say that we feel the commissar makes valid points in each of these instances, considers both sides of the debate, and tries to be somewhat tolerant of alternative viewpoints from time to time. Plus, he's got some very nice updates on the space program. And that's before tripping into the archives...

We had already noted that much-touted conservatives John Cole and Tacitus have stepped back from the precipices from time to time, and admitted that the Never-elected Usurper may have possibly screwed things up once in a while. It's not much, but it's a start. And it's amazing how much enmity their moderate stance has generated from their fellow members of the right side of the blogsphere

All we can ask is that sometimes some of our less controversial beliefs regarding the integrity and motives of the current administration be considered. Rational debate regarding them wouldn't be too bad, either. Obviously we take what we hear with some serious grains of salt, especially when it comes from those who have means, motive, and opportunity to spin news the way the current cabal wants it to be spun. And as unbelievable as it may seem to some, we have toned down our rhetoric significantly since the days of Ray-Gun, PapaDoc Putsch, and Mulled Rooney. Equially doubtful to wrongwingnuts everywhere is our ability to admit to error, and question the motives and integrity of some of the Democrats out there. But we'd have to say that there is a much greater possibility that our claims about our own behavior will intersect the reality-based community than our beliefs about the possibility of a change of heart amongst some of the more conservative of our fellow bloggers.

Update:Oops! We guess we're behind the times, because we wrote this before we saw this gem from Mithras over at Fables of the Reconstruction (whose site was not being found on the internets when we were putting this post together). This is a list of ten of the most notoriously obnoxiously Putsch-fellating sites out there, and we weren't aware that Tacitus was writing for Red State, one of the more rabidly conservative sites on this list. Although we'd probably put that Rottweiler clown in the list instead of Buzzmachine...

Posted by (: Tom :) at August 4, 2005 07:42 PM