In the blog world, there are people known as trolls. These are people, either conservative or liberal, who like to visit the sites of their ideological opponents and do whatever they can to fuck things up. They leave comments insulting other posters. They take on multiple aliases, and try to start fights. They spew hate, and do their best to shout other people down. In short, they try to drown out meaningful discourse… Whereas others attempt to have real, substantive discussions on issues, they hurl shit… Apparently, it makes them feel better about themselves.

This site has trolls.

If you look through the comments on the past few posts, you’ll notice the ones left by trolls immediately. They stand out like enormous black turds on fields of silk. They’re the comments that make you feel a little sick to your stomach. They’re the ones dripping with bile.

It’s the trolls, for instance, what are assuming the identities of our regular visitors and saying things like, “my name is brett, and I’m a big dummy,” and “i’m steven. i’m so liberal, i just spilled my latte on my ivy league diploma. oh, how i hate america.” And it’s the trolls who are regurgitating things they’ve heard Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity say, like “Vote Democratic…it’s easier than getting a job.” Their intention is to stop the discourse dead in its tracks, and discourage people from returning to this site. The trolls want to make your time spent here so hellish that you will never return. They want to burry our good ideas under an avalanche of garbage so that no one else can find them.

On one level, I suppose I should be honored. After all, they wouldn’t be going to the effort if we weren’t talking about things that threatened them, right? Maybe our Jeff Gannon discussions got to them. Maybe we poked too many holes in their reality for them to cope. Maybe the things we were talking about scared them. I suppose I could find a way to be happy about this, if not for one little thing.

The one little thing, however… that one little thing that makes this more unpleasant than it would be under normal circumstances… is that I know these trolls. They’ve been following me for twenty years. You see, a majority of the hateful, disrespectful, and antagonistic posts left on this site over the course of the past 24 hours were left by two childhood friends of mine. Their names are Mike and Jerrod.

Here are photos of them. Mike is the one in the hat, with the USA sweatpants. Jerrod is the one drinking Bud with a girl on his lap.

I could go on and on about this, but there are much more important things for us to be discussing, like Social Security reform, the Bush administration’s manipulation of the media, privacy issues, national healthcare, the environment, alternative energy and the war in Iraq. These issues that we’re facing are far more important to me than the fact that two middle-aged bullies were forced into an intellectual corner and had no choice but to come back the one way they knew how to, with the on-line version of the wedgie.

So, let’s just do our best to ignore them. Or, as Linette would say, let’s just pretend that they’re inside a big glass box… So, that’s my advice to you. Just look at them as you would an exhibit in a museum, specimens taken from an ugly stage in our evolution. (I’m trying to use the word “evolution” at least once a day.)

On a much happier note, I just got back from the first meeting of our progressive book club and I’m happy to say that things went incredibly well. We had 14 people show up, the discussion was lively, and I think we made some real progress in defining possible ways in which to counter the Republican noise machine (as personified by my two old friends, Mike and Jerrod).

Here’s hoping your old friends don’t turn out to be like mine.