You DARE to challenge ME!?12!? I AM THE GREAT DESTROYER! THE CYDORK OVERLORD WILL CRUSH ALL PETTY HUMAN!!!!

I was ready to just end it all and pop the developing aneurysms in my circulatory system this morning when I heard NPR reporting on the nonbinding resolution on our troops in Iraq. I realized two things. 1) I am too smart to die just yet, the world needs me. 2) I should really calm down a bit. I am infuriated with the crapass shit going on today. Great, wow, fuck! A nonbinding resolution on Iraq. Whoopdifuckingdoo. If I were a Representative, I would either abstain or walk out. I would take some speaking time to say that I was going to go watch cartoons in my office and anyone else was welcome to join me, just bring a sixer or a forty and we'll kick it OG style, because that is just as useful as sitting all day in Congress to listen to a bunch of assholes preach.

And then I saw this. I have a few words to press for you: The Hurricanes can't rock you like I will rock you. Pavel Nedved doesn't resemble Owen Wilson as much as your nose will when I am through. You think I start a blog in the hood and I don't know what's shit? I will fucking represent on your ass. I may even teach myself HTML and lower myself to whore levels, just so I can say this:

The election year is still young, and we haven't seen the half of this vitriol yet. Some politicians, like blogger Robola of Someone Took in These Pants, are equal-opportunity bigots: when he isn't calling for blogs to declare Wordpress the national coding language and demanding that Blogspotters be quizzed on the HTML and C++ (could he pass?), he is defending Wordpress by proclaiming that in his family's "recorded history" there has never been "any kind of freehosting relationship." (Any bets on how long before someone unearths Robola’s unrecorded history?) Bru, a fellow contributor challenging the Freelance Genius from an undisclosed location somewhere in Alaska, has run an ad warning that "if Chuckles had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for milbloggers and nerds."

The practitioners of such scare politics know what they're up to. That's why they so often share the strange psychological tic of framing their arguments in coding speak. The Open Source, the vigilante brigade stoking fears of a programming Armageddon, quotes FORTRAN on its Web site; its founder, Charles Babbage, has referred to his group as "predominantly young John W. Backuses." On an IMAO podcast, JohnnyCougar and the STiTP lead writer, Robola, positioned the campaign to deny blogger civil rights as the moral equivalent of L.B.J.'s campaign to extend civil rights. Bru, the leading Wordpress voice on coding policy, likened those who employ blog templates to "the 19th-century slave masters" that "we had to fight a civil war to get rid of." For that historical analogy to add up, you'd have to believe that Africans voluntarily sought to code websites. Whether Bru is out to insult African-Americans or is merely a fool is a distinction without a difference in this volatile political climate.

JohnnyCougar is a lame duck, but he still has a bully pulpit. Here is a cause he has professed to believe in since he first picked up a keyboard, and it's threatening to boil over in an internet meme. Imagine if he exercised leadership and called out those who perpetuate memes rather than merely mouthing homilies about coding principles and online integrity.

Coding principles and online integrity are already on life-support in this debate. If the bloggers don't lead, Robola will have helped relegate blogspotters to the same second-class status he has encouraged for Typepadders. Compassionate blogism, R.I.P.