Democratic Underground

     If only.
     I'd love nothing more than to see that piece of shit website run by a pervert named Skinner go six feet under. Then again, I'd also love to see Jon Swift and Steve Gilliard to come back to life, Pam Spaulding to come out of retirement and Baghdad Burning to make a comeback. But life's full of disappointments and tradeoffs and perhaps the Blogging Gods will reward me for my Job-like tribulations with a massive server crash that'll put the kibosh on DU.
     Longtime reader KPete was, well, kind enough to link to my last post regarding the obvious murder of Michael Hastings. I thank Pete since I know he meant well. But the comments he's attracted remind me why I haven't missed Democratic Underground for one minute since Skinner banned me eight years ago and why I will not miss political blogging for a minute beginning the nanosecond I finally decide to pull the plug for good.
     Because the trolls, backbiters, stalkers, limousine liberals and just plain, shit-stupid, head in the sand morons who refuse to listen to facts and instead decide to shoot the messenger in the back if they don't like the message have always been, at best, a distraction and, at worst, an increasingly incipient revelation that I've completely wasted the last eight and a half years of my life and am wasting my time even more needlessly and egregiously to titillate perhaps a handful of people while the other 95% of my so-called readership surfs in looking for tit torture methods and Nigerian porn.
     Here's a list of the shitty comments that had been lobbed at KPete and, consequently, me from people who by an Act of Congress should not be allowed near a keyboard or any electronic device with a data plan ever again from now until the end of time and beyond that:

sigh. this is piece of unadulterated shit.

     Wow. Even if I wasn't stunned by your unassailably brilliant rebuttal, I still have to point out that you'd make a little more sense if you were to remember the indefinite article next time.

Whoever wrote that decided that it's murder and already has determined that no evidence will be genuine to convince him or her otherwise.

     And whoever wrote this has already decided this isn't murder and has already determined that no evidence will be genuine to convince him or her otherwise.

This site has high quality conspiracy theories. If there is even such a thing.

     Apparently, it had somehow been lost on this highly perspicacious reader that I'd spent seven eloquent paragraphs explaining why I do not traffic in conspiracy theories, even prefacing my brilliant deconstruction using a highly relevant and highly contextual story regarding Justice Frankfurter and his inability to believe in the Holocaust. Swine, belly up to the trough for your pearls. Soo-ee!

Well, I'll have to quibble with this part: "...and a car hitting a solid object at any speed is going to result in a sickening crunching sound, not a boom like a bomb." I have actually experienced just that. A car going at a high rate of speed plowed right into a wall. It literally shook my house and it sounded exactly as if a bomb had gone off. The freakiest thing? The impact happened a quarter mile away. A couple of kids had stolen a car, taken it for a ride, then plowed it into a retaining wall -- air bags were deployed and the little shits were able to run away from the crash.

     Nothing traveling at any rate of speed and hitting any immovable object short of a meteor striking the planet earth is going to sound like a boom, make your house shake and your windows rattle, especially from a quarter of a mile away. And while this poor soul insists on using wholly apocryphal and nongermane hypotheticals to reach his contrary conclusions, the fact remains that Hastings' car struck a wooden utility pole, not a wall, and people felt the concussive envelope that is inevitably produced when a bomb goes off and heard the sound of an explosion not a quarter of a mile away but within 50-60 yards of the impact site. So, now who's changing facts to fit a prefab theory? I used the facts as plainly detailed in my lead video, which is why I'd classified my thoughts as a theory rather than a hypothesis. A theory depends upon facts, whereas a hypothesis does not.

Well, that's one way for a blogger to boost traffic. I'm always curious about why people give any credence to random blogs on issues like this. The blogger actually knows nothing concrete about this, but insists that it is a murder. Now, it's possible that it was a murder, but there is no way to know that at this point. There is especially no way this blogger knows that. I love the Internet, but I'm a little less fond of spreading random speculation bloggery around. It accomplishes nothing, is not news, and is merely the opinion of some person we don't know.

     For my part, I'd like to know where this Johnny-Come-Lately has been for the last eight and a half years while I've made a name for myself in political blogging. I'm also curious as to why he thinks that facts become believable only through personal recognition of the person positing them. And while we're talking about "news": The news of Hastings' death hours after it happened did not, strangely, contain any mention of the circumstances surrounding his death. We were told it was a car accident in Los Angeles (rather than Hollywood) and there was no mention of an explosion, reports of a blast or a massive ball of fire.
     Sometimes speculative blogs are the only places where people have the balls to ask these questions and to present evidence that is invariably contrary to the narrative troweled to us daily by the spineless corporate mainstream media. Blogs have always filled in the gaps constantly left by so-called journalists who crave access at all costs for the privilege of hearing bullshit up close and personal, exactly the kind of journalist Michael Hastings was not.

Hmm.. You hear "young guy drives 100 mph and crashes into a tree" and think conspiracy, not bender Interesting.

     No, I hear "young, responsible guy with a wife and promising career who has everything to live for and drives 100 mph and crashes into a light pole (not a tree) and think "conspiracy" and not bender.
     But I've already invested today more than enough of my time and not inconsiderable intellect and talents on brainless miscreants who insist on wasting hours of their day on sewers such as Democratic Underground and squirting faux vitriol from the shadows at people they don't even know because one person said something with which they disagree while blithely ignoring the facts as painstakingly presented by both me and the videographer. Only my desire to spread these facts makes this post worthwhile to open-minded folks, not the morons who'd allegedly read the original.
     So, KPete, if you want to post a link to this on DU, be my guest. Don't expect either of us will get any warmer a reception from the same class of knuckledraggers and mouthbreathers. I have a novel to write and a life to live.