In Febuary, when I said “Romney’s a real douche bag”, several upset commenters vowed never to read my blog again. I was even called a bigot (though Dale jumped in and explained how wrong a charge that is). Frankly, anytime I run a political post, especially ones where I call prominent Republicans names, that’s the reaction I expect.
So it kinda surprised me that the response to calling McCain a dick and his campaign an embarrassment was so tepid. No outrage. No promises to unsubscribe nor predictions that others would do likewise. Dale sounds like he agrees that McCain’s campaign is an embarrassment, even though he clearly supports McCain. RandyG doesn’t have anything to say about McCain one way or the other, but he thinks Obama is a “pompous dick”. Only BigJ provides any defense of McCain at all, but it’s an extremely weak defense. He described McCain as “not afraid to tick off a powerful, influential, big money contributor”, which I would expect is hard to say out loud with a straight face. Given that McCain has raked in millions in contributions from the oil industry after flip-flopping on offshore drilling, describing the Hilton’s $4,600 contribution as “powerful, influential, big money” is laughable. Hell, McCain is returning ten times that amount in “unusual” (read: possibly illegal) contributions because they “just didn’t sound right”.
I figure there are two main possible reasons for the lack of outrage:
- All my readers who are willing to unsubscribe because I don’t agree with their political view have already left, leaving only those who agree with or simply ignore my political posts.
- The number of people willing to stand up and defend McCain, even anonymously in my small corner of the Internet, is very small.
Personally, I probably a little of both, but I’m guessing it’s more the latter than the former.