I realise this was a little unfair to Scott, who from all accounts is a decent, slighty nerdy guy... who had the singular misfortune to be the diarist of the get-together where CC was an invited guest.
Scott was obviously surprised to find the initial invitation to participate in the comments at his blog. His flat and non-responsive comments are no doubt reflections of his "deer caught in headlights" surprise and dismay.
I invite Scott and all the others at the event to share their feelings with me here in the comments, or by email.
Naively, I had actually hoped that at least a couple of them would have the courage to show up and disassociate themselves from Cynic's shameful treatment of Wanda Watkins, the mother of Lane Watkins, who was killed recently in Afghanistan.
That apparently, was not to be.
What really surprised me was that none of the "progressive" female bloggers dropped in to take issue with Cynic's misogynistic treatment of other women on his blog. You hear stories of rabid, liberal feminists... but they were nowhere to be found today.
Of course, what we got instead of rational discourse was mostly a vicious stew of name-calling... which largely skirted the issue at hand and covered absolutely no one with glory.
I invite you all to skip through the comments and note the ratio of credible premise to personal insult.
(note: it's just past 9pm and here's another 3 word comment... "lol! confused much?"... which illustrates that very point)
It's pretty illuminating.
Note that throughout it all, Canadian Cynic himself chose to keep a very low profile. His uber-trolling proxy and alter-ego Ti-Guy, with whom you are all likely familiar, made up for all that... making a full 20 percent of all 51 (at last count) comments on one of the posts. They were all, apart from 2 invitations to fellatio, name calling of a particularly childish nature.
Many of you may not be aware that Canadian Cynic has, over the last week, made a couple of frantic appeals to Stephen Taylor at Blogging Tories to clamp a lid on any discussion of his identity. That speaks loudly to Cynic's awareness that he has indeed crossed a line that could cost him dearly in his non-blogging life.
I've also talked with Stephen about the nature of this type of personal, as opposed to general interplay between bloggers. Stephen pointed out that BT had been established primarily as a forum to discuss conservative and like-minded ideology and that personal wars, if you will, detracted mightily from that end.
I think we've proven that today.
Note that I do, in principle, support Stephen's stated objective. My purpose here today was to counter a particularly distasteful screed by a particularly offensive individual... as well as to try determine if there was any sort of consensus regarding what constitutes "going over the line."
Anyway... I'll leave off here. It's been a wearying and somewhat disappointing day. Barring organised retaliation from Cynic and his rat-pack followers, I'll just walk away from what seems to be a failed experiment.
So Cynic, you can stow all the melodramatics about me stalking you. I do hope though, that every time you see a uniformed Canadian soldier, you remember Lane Watkins... and the disrespect you offered to his mother and his family and friends.
You owe them more than you can appreciate.
**********
UPDATE: Scott Tribe shares his opinion...
With someone... somewhere...
"My thoughts have been made privately to someone who requested my opinion on the matter, and for now, thats where it will stay."**********
PATHETIC POSTSCRIPT:
Meanwhile, over at Canadian Cynic... just like Garth Turner, it's all about the man in the mirror...
"God Almighty, but how unspeakably dense can one person be? I wasn't talking about potential legal action from me, but from some unfortunate, innocent bystander that Neo ends up harassing in his shotgun-spread vendetta to track me down."Yeah, that's right CC... Wanda Who?
You sad, pathetic little man.
**********
PATHETIC POSTSCRIPT REDUX:
I had thought we were finished with this, but CC is apparently getting so desperate... that he now has an "invisible friend."
"I received earlier on the private CC HQ red phone from a member of the Blogging Tories and, while he asked me to keep it private, I don't think I'm violating any confidences by reprinting it, stripped of any identifying information..."Are you with CC so far? He's apparently got an inside man at BT... let's call him, uh... DEEP TORY.
One of the bloggers from the BT aggregator - you know... the people CC customarily refers to as "cunts & sluts" - has decided, out of the goodness of his/her scary, hidden heart to tip CC to a nefarious plot against, well... CC.
This mysterious turncoat, whose name CC is honour-bound not to reveal, spills the details of the conspiracy...
"I'm sure you're already aware of the attempts, but I thought you should know a bunch of folks have contacted me trying to develop some united effort to expose your identity."Now, I have to say right here, that I am simply outraged at this allegation.
After all the effort I put into this post over the weekend... the least you guys could do is include me in your dark machinations.
So what about it, you treacherous neocons?
Don't think I'm not taking this all the way up the chain-of-command to Darth Stephen himself.
Technorati Tags: Lane Watkins, Wanda Watkins, Canadian Cynic