(This was going to be Update#2 to my last post, but it started getting a bit large. )

Private Radio asks “Could OSM Start A Blog War?” As the title says, I think they’re too late.

LaShawn Barber says by inferrence that I’m an outsider who is jealous of the OSM bloggers. I’m a little confused by that. Since I’m blogrolled there, wouldn’t that make most outsiders view me as an insider? I don’t feel like an insider, mainly because I have yet to be shown what it is I’m inside. But let’s be clear on that. For the record, I have no problem with not being an insider. Who the hell is this guy calling himself “King Turd” anyway? Why should he be an insider?

But if La Shawn has even noticed I exist, (and it doesn’t matter to me either way) then she assumes it’s just outsider jealousy on my part too… it couldn’t possibly be that such an amateurish production by folks I’ve voluntarily chosen to associate with could make me question my own involvement in it, nor make me worry that it could actually be detrimental to developing this blog as a “serious” (i.e.: at least minimally money-making) hobby or entrance to other things.

As part of my usual practice, I won’t do what naysayers desperately want me to do: link to them. Instead, I’ll just feel pity for them. Sadly, it’s usually low-traffic bloggers who blog negatively about other bloggers, but there are exceptions, of course. There are much better ways to build readership, people.

But if you want to focus time and energy on me and members of OSM, you’re free to do so. But I truly wish OSM bloggers wouldn’t dignify naysayers by giving you a much bigger stage than you have on your own.

That must be why I’ve posted all those attacks on La Shawn Barber over the last week. More traffic! All… um… zero of the attacks. Wait, I know, I’ll count this as the first one! Because, you know, she doesn’t care about all the people that attack her, especially from the conservative side, so she feels no need to lump them all in one pile and call them anything like “jealous outsiders.” Or the attacks on . . . . ummmmmm. . . . No one, except Charles Johnson and Roger Simon; the two masters of foot-in-mouth disease.

Sigh. Well, it’s nice to know that Charles and Roger aren’t alone in their suffering. Frankly, until LaShawn carelessly lumped me in among “jealous outsiders” and made some really foolish assumptions about the reasons for all the criticsim the OSM is getting, I could not have cared less what she thought. What drew me into this publicly was the classless way Charles Johnson handled the criticism from Ann Althouse, combined with the sloppy way the launch has been handled. The latter I would have just groaned silently about, but in combination with the former, I realized this ship was in serious trouble of a spectacular foundering. And I elected to state my opinion about it, forcefully.

I’m not going to kid anyone. I published the first (and every subsequent) “anti-osm” post in the full knowledge that I would be linked by and receive traffic from:

• People who are of completely opposite political alignment,
• People who want to see OSM fail,
• People who have axes to grind, and
• People who enjoy other people’s misery.

It really sucks to know that Mary Mapes and Dan Rather are somewhere, breaking out the celebratory champagne, laughing their asses off in glee, and going “See! See! We said all along that these bloggers weren’t professionals!!” Well, none of the types of bloggers listed above (or their readers) are likely to become permanent readers of this blog. Therefore, a public attack for the purpose of gaining visits would be a useless, if not self-defeating, strategy. So toss that idea out the window. I regard all of this as a “necessary evil” to the goal here, which is to, in the immortal words of Billy Jack, “put the left side of my foot upside the right side of [OSM’s] head.”

Why? Because I cannot respect or follow the emperor of the story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But disrepect alone isn’t an explanation. This is: Were I in the story, I’d have gone over the top into active revolt if he’d sent the soldiers into the crowd to arrest a kid laughing at his nakedness.

Listen well: People, I work for the local government. I work for an organization whose first response to a major gaffe is always to pretend there’s nothing wrong, or that what they think is reality–not what the viewer thinks. The second reaction is to try and silence them. What the hell do you think drove me to including the city of Houston in my blogging in the first place? Isn’t that just a little, you know, dangerous for me?

Now, is a person who’s crazy enough to do that going to hesitate to publicly reprimand an associate (I guess that’s the best term) for the moral equivilent of sending soldiers into the crowd to silence a critic? Especially if it’s the only way it’s going to be heard? I mean seriously, if Roger and Charles aren’t listening to Dennis, whom they actually worked with apparently screwed over, I’m sure they’re going to take a bit of private advice from one of the smallest blogs on their roll.

Yo, Empress. I’m not here to fight you, nor to accept your slings and arrows, nor to entice you into giving me linky-love (or hate). My concern is totally, one hundred percent, completly selfish: I want “the former Pajamas Media” to succeed. I want the principals to stop making damn fools out of themselves. I want them to stop vindicating the Old Media’s disdain for the New Media. I want to belong to an organization that I don’t have too look back at in five years, and think of my time with it as the moral equivilent of doing porno films to break into Hollywood.

I’m not doing this to dance on your graves, I’m doing it to dance at your victory.

Now stop being such idiots and make it happen.