The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

5,000,000 Hits!

Posted on | November 9, 2010 | 30 Comments

About 9 a.m. today, we passed the 5-million mark, riding the wave of last night’s Instalanche.

Our joy at this achievement is tempered by the knowledge that loyal sidekick Smitty will soon be deployed to an Undisclosed Location, where Uncle Sam has decided that his astonishing powers of IT geekery are required to intimidate the Taliban into surrender.

When I expressed concerns for Smitty’s safety in the Undisclosed Location — some place on the other side of the world, in a country ending with “-stan” — he told me not to worry and used one of those super-secret military acronyms to explain.

It seems that Smitty will be deployed as a “REMF.”

While the duties of a REMF are highly classified — I get the idea they’re kind of a combination of Green Berets and ninjas — Smitty assured me that being a REMF is actually quite safe.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “If they ever get to me, the situation has gone so completely sideways, we’re all screwed anyway.”

This was strangely reassuring, as we’ve come to rely heavily on Smitty’s abilities. This blog went full-time in March 2008 and notched its first million hits in February 2009. Smitty joined up shortly thereafter, assuming responsibility for compiling FMJRA Saturday and Rule 5 Sunday. We crossed the 2-million mark in July 2009, reached 3 million in November 2009, and recorded the 4 millionth visit in June this year.

The weirdest thing about this astonishing success — the triumph of our Underpants Gnome Business Plan — is not merely that we have never been asked to explain it at any gathering of conservative New Media activists. For a long time, I blamed AFP’s Erik Telford for us being blackballed this way, but when Tabitha Hale left us off the agenda for BlogCon, I finally realized we are far more universally loathed than I had hitherto suspected.

OK, that’s weird — why does Tabitha Hale hate me? — but it’s not the weirdest part of our wild ride to 5 megahits.

No, the truly weird thing is that we haven’t had a single offer to sell out.

Despite our well-nigh notorious status as greedy capitalist bloggers, and despite creditable rumors that Our Plutocratic Republican Overlords are sitting atop a king’s ransom of ill-gotten billions, no emissary of the GOP Establishment has yet come forward to offer us the relatively modest sum it would take to persuade us to knock it off.

And the price isn’t going to decrease. I figure we’d start negotiations at a rate of $1 per hit to date. You see that, a mere 18 months ago, I could have been bribed to cease-and-desist for a piddling million bucks and our asking price was still under $2 million in May 2009. Our Plutocratic Republican Overlords took no notice, however, and instead wasted more than $10 million on the doomed Charlie Crist campaign.

Yeah, sorry that didn’t work out for you, Mr. Cornyn.

Principles? Yeah, we’ve got principles, but we are not unreasonable men, and we’re still willing to entertain offers.

Instead, these idiots keep trying to get the blogosphere on their side by handing out fat consulting contracts to their buddies who send us press releases telling us what a wonderful job they’re doing there at GOP HQ. Yeah, and paying useless dingbats like Mike Murphy $90,000 a month to run campaigns — how’s that working out for you, guys?

Anyway, we’re still here, with help from our tip-jar hitters, busting the Establishment’s balls every day. Whenever I mention that we haven’t yet achieved worldwide accolades and untold wealth in the process, someone will inevitably accuse me of “whining.” What I’m actually trying to emulate, however, is the description of the ancient Athenians, provided by the Corinthians in a speech recorded in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War:

“And what they have planned but not carried out, they think that in this they lose something already their own; what they have attempted and gained, that in this they have achieved but little in comparison with what they mean to do.”

No partial success can satisfy our fierce determination to achieve Maximum Blogospheric Hegmony. Let us quote one eminent authority on effective New Media strategies:

Indeed. Not “a great writer” like Kinsey Schofield perhaps, but most certainly tenacious.

UPDATE: Chris Wysocki hasn’t yet been Tweeted by Alyssa Milano, yet seems to have lots of Rule 5 action, while Troglopundit’s primitive paleolithic blog also extends congratulations.

Category: Blogging

Comments

30 Responses to “5,000,000 Hits!”

  1. new othermccain guy
    November 9th, 2010 @ 1:46 pm

    Hotair.com, a site I used to depend on, has become Mitt Romney/gay marriage/repeal DADT/bash Palin central. More and more, I’ve been turning to theothermccain.com as one of the alternatives. I can see why you’ve hit the five million mark.

  2. Agnes B. Bullock
    November 9th, 2010 @ 2:59 pm

    Congratulations- an honor well deserved!

  3. Malclave
    November 9th, 2010 @ 4:30 pm

    While the duties of a REMF are highly classified — I get the idea they’re kind of a combination of Green Berets and ninjas

    Chairborne ranger!

  4. Theblogprof
    November 10th, 2010 @ 11:38 am

    Be safe, Smitty. We’ll be praying for you. And big congrats on the 5,000,000 mark!