A Liberal Among The Lizards

By Cernig If you read one piece of metablogging today, make sure it's (new contributor at The Crone Speaks) Ravenavital's excellent retrospective of her year among the "lizards" and "freepers" of the the extreme right-wing blogs Little Green Footballs and Free Republic. A year ago, I embarked on a dark and frightening journey. I began monitoring the Free Republic and Little Green Footballs, two of the more well-know right wing blogs. I felt like Frodo, unsure of what Ring Wraiths or other dangers I might encounter. Would I emerge as the political equivolent of a Stepford Wife? Would my ‘97 Buick suddenly sport a “Freedom isn’t Free” bumper sticker? Would I inexplicably develop an affinity for jingoistic country songs? Maybe this was a bad idea. I’m a bleak sort anyway, and who knows how long my Klonopin prescription would shield me. My goal: get some insight into the Bizarro World of political blogging, go through the Looking Glass and venture forth into EvilLand. Researching posts, I end up reading LGF in particular with reasonable frequency. I have to agree with Ravenavital's feeling, that an encounter with LGF's commenters is like "picking up a wet towel on your laundry room floor during earwig season." I've also seen everything else she describes - gay-bashing, hypocritically denouncing Muslims for woman-hating while wallowing in their own mysogeny, the bigotted and racist not-all-that-codewords, a vast and overweening Liberal Derangement Syndrome. She's braver than I am, I couldn't stomach it every day for a year.