Why Bill Strong deserved a good, swift one to the nads.

Sigh. I just got e-mail from a longtime friend, chiding me for this piece, wondering why I have to be so mean to dimwits like Bill Strong. Asked she, "Why do you have to be so vicious? Why can't you just point out that he's wrong and leave it at that?" A good question, and one that deserves an answer just so you all understand why I think that a depressing number of right-wing wankers need to be, not only corrected publicly, but hauled out to the sidewalk and beaten on the kidneys until they piss blood. Because, quite simply, they deserve it.

Let's take Mr. Strong as an example, shall we? (And all of the following applies just as well to one Aaron Lee Wudrick, but I probably didn't need to point that out, did I?)

Mr. Strong wrote this piece which, as I explained earlier, was absolute swill. So did he really deserve a king-sized smackdown because of it?

If Mr. Strong had just expressed that sentiment in passing during a conversation, probably not. It would have been an off-the-cuff remark, perhaps based on a misunderstanding of something he read, and it would have been sufficient to just point out that he was full of shit and leave it at that. But that's not what happened, is it?

Mr. Strong's opinion did not just happen on the spur of the moment, did it? Rather, it required him to actually do some reading, followed by composing a post for his own blog, which makes his fuck-up somewhat less forgivable. If you're going to post something that publicly, I feel that you have somewhat more of a responsibility to get your facts straight, something Mr. Strong totally failed to do. Still, this probably wouldn't have merited anything more than, "Bill, you ignorant slut." So what was Mr. Strong's real crime?

It was the patronizing snark. Not only did he screw up the facts completely, he then used his complete misunderstanding to start insulting the entire Democratic party. As in, "... Democrats' tactics of false claims ... lies, deception and hypocracy of the Democrats ... the Dummocrats [sic] ... this insanity ..." And that's why Mr. Strong deserved to get the crap kicked out of him. But it doesn't even end there.

The most irritating thing about so many residents of Wankerville is not that they fuck up their facts so often, but that they absolutely refuse to correct or recant later when they're called on it. Even after they're caught disseminating rubbish, you rarely see an actual apology. And when the screw-up is this blatant and this hideous, I'm not talking about an apology in the sense of, "Oh, sorry, I misread."

No, I'm talking about an apology in the sense of, "Jesus Christ, did I fuck that one up! I'm sorry, I take it all back and let me grovel a little bit while I'm here to beg my readers for forgiveness for having laid so much unspeakable rubbish on them!" That's the kind of apology I'm talking about.

And you know how often that happens, don't you? Try "never." Instead, when you lay into arbitrary wanker for his or her lies, what you generally get in response is, "Hey, dude, chill. What's your problem? Man, you folks on the Left sure take things personally. You should try to get a grip on that temper and mellow out." Or something to that effect. Followed, of course, by no apology, no retraction, no correction and a quick change of subject.

So what should we expect from Mr. Strong? There are a couple of possibilities. He can acknowledge how badly he screwed the pooch with that post and publish a clear and unambiguous retraction of his idiocy, along with an apology to the Democratic Party. That would go a long way to rehabilitating his image as a non-doofus.

Or, following the lead of so many of his right-wing wanker colleagues, he can dodge, weave and tap dance and get all bent out of shape about how mean I am about smacking him around and never admit that he was full of crap from the start and just move on and hope everyone forgets about this little incident.

I figure a day or two should be enough to see if Mr. Strong is man enough to come clean. We'll be checking back in later. And if he tries to weasel his way out of this, then he has no grounds for complaining later when someone else takes him out to the woodshed, does he?