Admissions and retractions and apologies, oh my!

Not to belabour this but, if you want to catch up on the recent bitch slapfest between yours truly and one R. Christopher Edey, you'll notice that what we have here is the rare opportunity to see if a member of the right-wing wankersphere is physically capable of an actual retraction. (We already know that that's beyond anything Weasel Boy is capable of.)

To recap, Mr. Edey accused me of telling a "Category 5 lie," an accusation I promptly fed through the woodchipper. To which Mr. Edey, in a rather depressing display of classlessness in the comments section, reluctantly agreed that, in fact, my original statement "was not technically a lie," as if it was still a lie in some other abstract, philosophical way. It's one thing to accuse someone of lying; it's quite another to accuse someone of that overpowering level of deceit, only to have to admit later that you screwed the pooch.

So, given that Mr. Edey made the initial accusation and, further in his own comments section, wrote:

Do you consider pointing out the obvious mistruths in CC's New Orleans post an attack? I see it more as a public service than anything else.

I think it's only proper that Mr. Edey issue a fairly public and unqualified retraction of his original accusation. Don't think of it as an attack -- think of it as a "public service." Now let's see if Mr. Edey is capable of that kind of mea culpa -- direct, to the point and without the shucking, jiving, tap dancing and goalpost moving that so typifies the conservative wankersphere.

Let's go, Mr. Edey. We're all waiting. (And I don't mean a retraction here -- I mean on your own site, Mr. Edey. Front and centre.)

POSTSCRIPT: And while we're at it, I believe Edey owes a big wet one to the entire community of Progressive Bloggers as well. His article proposed to lay a general smackdown on the entire ProgBlog population, and yet he spent almost his entire post picking on all of three people, with a majority devoted to moi when I wasn't even a member of PB anymore.

Edey criticizes the members of PB for somehow condoning my earlier writings when, in fact, a number of them did take me to task for them, both publicly and privately. It was for just this reason -- to isolate the criticism to myself -- that I chose to leave PB, so they didn't get tarred by association, either fairly or unfairly.

Apparently, such subtleties are lost on Edey who just started swinging, hoping to connect, so I think a second apology is in order here as well.

And again, we're waiting. Tick, tick ...