Blogging is full of surprises. One thing I never expected when I started blogging was that there would be a paparazzi. It didn’t occur to me that there would be some kind of disaffected fan club that would go around analyzing everything from the hours I keep to the rating habits of my girlfriend. I had no idea that I would become the subject of conspiracy theories. Who knew that The Mighty Kos would seek to destroy me at the instructions of the Elders of Zion or that Simon Rosenthal would seek to co-opt me by secretly paying me off with blogad revenue. I’ve seen a lot of these theories going around. Today the big theory is that I am a racist. A few weeks ago I was a major booster of the Casey campaign for senate. The odd thing about all this is that none of it is coming from the right. It all seems to be coming from the left. Or maybe it is just supposed to look that way. I don’t know.
Perhaps the most amusing thing about this is just how badly thought out most of the conspiracies are. I get lumped in with other bloggers that are totally different from me, have different political views, and do not coordinate with me. Chris Bowers was initially a Kucinich supporter in 2004. I didn’t take Kucinich seriously at all and supported John Kerry from beginning to end. Yet, Bowers is constantly treated as though he is some kind of centrist, especially in comparison to me.
He’s not. His politics are different from mine and they are immensely different from Markos and from the whole general tenor of Daily Kos. But you would never know that if you just listened to the paparazzi.
It looks to me like the paparazzi are almost uniformly made up of people that have been banned from Daily Kos (at a minimum) and that have some kind of obsessive-complusive jilted lover mania that requires them to read every comment made by a front-pager at the orange site and then comment on it. This has been going on for a long time. But now it has extended to Chris Bowers and to me.
I guess it is a compliment, in its own way. It’s kind of bizarre though. It’s hard to believe that people have so much anger and so much time to do these things. As far as I know, I haven’t done anything to anger people other than show leniency to a member of this site that some people wanted banned (a la Michael Ledeen….faster please). That hardly seems like a reason for making a habit out of bashing me personally and stalking around my private life. But, hey, like I said, blogging is full of surprises.
It isn’t easy to do what the front-pagers here do. I’d like to think we provide everyone some entertainment, some information, a nice place to hang out and discuss stuff. Unlike some other sites, we’re not in this for the money. I’d like to make enough to pay my bills and not have to dip into my savings, but that is rarely the case.
I am getting a feeling for why so many celebrities hate the press so much. Invasion of privacy, taking statements out of context, misquoting, outright malice, libel. It’s not very amusing. And I’m not entirely sure it is worth putting up with.
