The Other McCain

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

Twenty Percent Plus One

Posted on | March 29, 2012 | 146 Comments

Rusty Weiss puts my plight in perspective:

Two in 10 or 17 per cent of men aged 25 to 54 — traditionally the backbone of the workforce — are unemployed.

Yeah: I am now also unemployed — an ex-blogger.

Congratulations, Tabitha. I quit.

Category: Uncategorized

Comments

146 Responses to “Twenty Percent Plus One”

  1. PaulLemmen
    March 29th, 2012 @ 6:55 pm

    I won’t be there at BlogCon. Besides the fact it is outside the middle district of Florida, I have zero interest in a blogging workshop or convention.
    I do hope to meet you when you come to cover the Convention in Tampa (I live 15 minutes from the venue). I may even offer you housing at no charge (we have a guest room and broadband as well as whisky).

  2. Wasserjungen
    March 29th, 2012 @ 6:56 pm

    C’mon RS lighten up. Smitty has a new addition to take care of and Wombat is just getting his groove. When you quit what about them? REALLY? Is that dingbat worth it?

  3. ThomasD
    March 29th, 2012 @ 7:15 pm

     It’s not about building a moment, it’s about building a guild.

    The problem being that there is no effective way to pose a barrier to entry other than these sorts of ‘cons’ and other such cliquish gatherings.

    Count me as another who seriously doubts Stacy has hung up his new mass media communicatin’ ways.   He may be in a transition but the boy has that journo boogie woogie in him and it has to come out.

  4. Bob Belvedere
    March 29th, 2012 @ 7:38 pm

    I got yer pot of gold right here!

  5. Bob Belvedere
    March 29th, 2012 @ 7:41 pm

    Any man that likes PDQ Bach is all right with me.

  6. richard mcenroe
    March 29th, 2012 @ 8:38 pm

     Just beer for Stacy.  The National Guard and the Highway Patrol insist.

  7. PaulLemmen
    March 29th, 2012 @ 9:05 pm

     Hehehehe, sounds like a challenge to me …

  8. robertstacymccain
    March 29th, 2012 @ 9:47 pm

    With remarkable success, she turned the blogosphere into the Friends of Tabitha Club.

    Almost as if that was the goal.

  9. CCR
    March 29th, 2012 @ 9:55 pm

    I hear her next move is changing her name to Ozymandias.

    Along with practicing “off with their heads.”

    I’d say she’s the Mama Cass of the blogosphere, but Mama Cass had actual talent for something other than self-aggrandizing posing as the conservative new media sweetheart.

  10. CCR
    March 29th, 2012 @ 9:57 pm

     What you said.

  11. Adjoran
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:09 pm

     Not to mention the deer population.

  12. Adobe_Walls
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:21 pm

    She used to blog and she was active in Obamacare protests as she lives near DC. Don’t know what she’s done since then.

  13. Adjoran
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:31 pm

    Hey, the world’s biggest, ugliest sissy is piling on – Woolcott taunts McCain on Twitter, check the feed at right.  There’s also a comment from Flabby Hale.

  14. Adjoran
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:36 pm

     Wow – awareness and goodwill among bloggers, training and networking.  Cool!

    Know what would be even better?  If somebody invented some kind of network where bloggers could do all that from home, on their own computers or something.

    That would be really cool.

  15. Adjoran
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:38 pm

     You noticed that, too?

    Now listening to:  Taj Mahal, “I’m Goin’ Home (Where Wimmin Got Some Meat On Their Bones)”

  16. richard mcenroe
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:52 pm

     Uhhh… be careful what you wish for.
    http://youtu.be/neUaSTSKFZc

  17. Jeff Goldstein
    March 29th, 2012 @ 11:58 pm

    Ok, Stacy. I’m mostly a lone wolf, but fuck it.  Call me up tomorrow and you and I and some others who still secretly read me will put our own shit together.

    I’m not as dead and buried as some seem to think and hope.

  18. Michael
    March 30th, 2012 @ 12:01 am

     Nah.  Don’t do that.  His boys look pretty big, and his wife could really, really hurt you.

    Also, don’t quit, Stacy.  Your country desperately  needs you.

  19. Cynthia Yockey
    March 30th, 2012 @ 12:52 am

    Oh, for heaven’s sake! You must be exhausted. Get some sleep, go for some long walks in nature to restore your soul. I wasn’t invited to BlogCon, either, but I registered and will attend, if I can raise the money required. Just register, raise the money and go. You have created a community and have plenty more to say.

    P.S.

    Note to Mrs. Other McCain: Men need praise like they need air. When I gave Stacy a ride home from the airport, it struck me that more praise from you would do him a world of good and fill him with the courage and optimism he needs to succeed and provide for his family. You will benefit more than he does. Here are some phrases to get you started: “You always do ______ so well,” “I love it when you _______,” “I thank God for you in my life.” Until this comes easily to you, try for a rate of at least one expression of praise or gratitude per waking hour and two or three minutes of praise and gratitude before you fall asleep.

  20. I Write for Money : The Other McCain
    March 30th, 2012 @ 1:50 am

    […] (typeof(addthis_share) == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}When I quit the blog Thursday morning, some people attempted to persuade me to reconsider — and I resented their efforts.If I am […]

  21. CCR
    March 30th, 2012 @ 2:03 am

    Count me in.

    Oh, and OUTLAW!

  22. K-Bob
    March 30th, 2012 @ 2:47 am

    Have you even taken a look at the cost of tubes lately?  It would be a system of tubes, and ALGORE has had most of them stuffed with Man/Bear/Pig grease.

    If we weren’t in a depression, I have some ideas on strings-with-cans that shows promise.  But everyone hoards string in depressions.

    Sorry, dude.  Your “Net Work” idea can’t be done.  But you ought to copyright that term.

  23. K-Bob
    March 30th, 2012 @ 3:04 am

     “That would be like me never writing again because Joy Behar never reviewed my books.”

    Oh come on, man!  She reads everything in her slush pile every week.  It’s why her lips are swollen and bruised and must be hidden by dark lipstick.

  24. K-Bob
    March 30th, 2012 @ 3:16 am

     From the list of speakers, I’d imagine its about working for websites that pay per post or something.  I’m not sure what it could have to do with “blogging.”

  25. Adjoran
    March 30th, 2012 @ 5:41 am

    But I insult everybody.  Am I supposed to lighten up because she’s an inexperienced little girl, a delicate flower not able to withstand the hard knocks of the real world?  I do declaaaah, might she get a case of the vapors?

    When she’s dishing it out, she sounds all “I is Wymyn, hear me roar,” so is there some problem with mistreating her miserably, like I do everyone else?

    It’s the fat jokes, right?  You lost a good bit of weight, you have empathy.  Hey, I’m overweight myself, but if I posted an old skinny pic I’d expect a ration.

    Like my old pal REVOLTING!!! used to say, “If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay under the porch.”

  26. Adjoran
    March 30th, 2012 @ 6:14 am

     It’s because you tend to get too deep.  They need a freer-floating vibe, something descending liltingly like a feather, born aloft by its own transcendent lightness.

    Or else, a nice rack.

  27. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 7:22 am

    Stacy, people who snub you have their noses so far up in the air that they risk drowning when it rains. Fuckum. I have a better idea. You’re not the only one who isn’t included in these things, you know, there are thousands of us who aren’t good enough for those people (fuckum) and we’d LOVE to go to a convention for bloggers and listen to America’s Last REAL Reporter share his insights form his decades of experience in both old and new media! Why do we have to wait an hope that elitist snobs will include us in their self congratulatory festivals when we can make OUR OWN convention? I have some connections that might be useful in putting such a thing together. I see no good reason why we can’t do our own thing, with you as our headliner. There are other popular bloggers who are not welcome at the places that diss you, too, especially in the counter-jihad blogging community. Forget the elitist RINO-dhimmi fests, why not have a convention for the Conservative bloggers who are ostracized by the establishment because these bloggers are more concerned with telling the truth than they are with avoiding “offending” the easily offended?

  28. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 7:23 am

     She has not fully succeeded.

  29. Larimerica
    March 30th, 2012 @ 8:46 am

    You make it sound like Stacy complained to you about his wife. Telling the Internet how she should manage her relationship with her husband is probably the least effective way you could have pursued your professed goal. Very, very tacky.

  30. ThePaganTemple
    March 30th, 2012 @ 9:46 am

     Good point. Let me take a step in that direction right now-

    Fuck Tabitha Hale.

  31. richard mcenroe
    March 30th, 2012 @ 11:27 am

     I must insist on insulting Wolcott, nonetheless. “The only person James Wolcott  ever influenced was the waiter who spat in his dinner.”

  32. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 1:13 pm

     I never heard of it until Stacy started talking about it. He needs to stop giving them free publicity.

  33. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 1:15 pm

     I got some swampland…

  34. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 1:18 pm

    Hell yeah, go down swinging, blaze of effing glory and all of that! But most importantly, don’t leave, please.

  35. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 1:23 pm

    Yeah!

    And I own the mightiest Ban Hammer in the entire Dextrosphere, if you need help getting rid of the ghouls in your comments section, you may borrow it.

  36. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 1:25 pm

    Yay! This sort of thing makes me happy, when friends who I admire find each other’s blogs. 🙂 

  37. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 2:08 pm

     She didn’t turn me, I am in the Friends of STACY MCCAIN CLUB, thank you very much!  I would not be familiar with her if you hadn’t written about her. I was your fan before I became a friend, and before I started blogging at all. Freedom works sends a lot of emails asking for money, and that’s mostly what I know about them.

  38. Zilla of the Resistance
    March 30th, 2012 @ 2:10 pm

     Fuck that shit.

    But my catchphrase in these situations has always been, “fuckum”. Pretty much the same thing.

  39. ThePaganTemple
    March 30th, 2012 @ 5:19 pm

    @ZillaoftheResistance:disqus  

    I was thinking you were who I heard about his blog from, I think on Facebook, but couldn’t remember for sure.

  40. Cynthia Yockey
    March 30th, 2012 @ 6:24 pm

    Bloggers live a good deal of their lives in public and if I hadn’t stayed up all night after getting home from driving Stacy home from the airport, I’d have had the energy to write a post on an argument I had on the subject of praise with Stacy during our drive. So Mrs. Other McCain was going to hear this from me in public sooner or later. In fact, I intend to harp on it.

    The background is that while I was driving, Stacy called his daughter, who is newly married. Stacy gave her what I thought was very sound advice to praise her husband to encourage him while he was working on a difficult task that would give them a better future and I seconded his advice to her. Our argument was about how the praise should be phrased. Stacy’s advice was for his daughter to say things like, “You are the smartest and handsomest man in the world.” Now, at the beginning of my relationship with my late life partner, I told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I could see from her face she did not believe this — until I added two words to make the sale, “to me.” So I tried to get Stacy to tell his daughter to praise her husband saying things like, “You are the smartest and handsomest man in the world to me.”

    Well, “to me” just narrowed the praise down much too far for Stacy. Since the idea is to praise someone in the way they like and accept, that’s the way he ought to be praised. However, I can see where such an unlimited statement would stick in the throat of people who can’t say such a thing without running a contest in their heads on whether the statement is objectively and universally true. Apparently Mrs. Other McCain is one of those people, so she and Stacy have been at an impasse. The upshot is that Stacy is not getting praised by the one person in the world who ought to be doing it and who would greatly empower her husband and improve her marriage and family life if she did.

    Frankly, I don’t know how Stacy can bear being starved like this. I know it would be grounds for divorce for me. It’s no wonder he’s hurting and fed up with feeling disrespected.

    My own fell ulterior motive for lambasting Mrs. Other McCain publicly on this issue is that I think if she starts praising her husband, which he richly deserves, Stacy will greatly soften his attitude on women’s equality and may even stop lecturing conservative women on feminism so we don’t have to thrash him on the issue so often. Everyone wins.

    P.S.
    I am going to post this comment at my blog, A Conservative Lesbian, with a photo of Stacy and me from that night.

  41. Cynthia Yockey
    March 30th, 2012 @ 6:34 pm

    Conservatives are not in a good position to find fault with liberals for their vicious and vulgar attacks on conservative women, such as Gov. Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin, when they are just as vicious and vulgar towards conservative women.

    A year ago Tabitha Hale got smacked in the face by a union protester for asking him a reasonable question while he was participating in a threatening demonstration outside FreedomWorks, her workplace. The conservative world rallied to her side, as it should have.

    She is doing a hard and thankless job organizing BlogCon, which helps conservative bloggers get to know one another and improve their skills. There’s hardly anyone she’s going to make entirely happy. If you are unhappy with her, I think the most appropriate course of action is to pound sand.

  42. Cynthia Yockey
    March 30th, 2012 @ 6:42 pm

    You don’t seem to understand the big leagues very well. The big dogs use courteous language to make their points and they do not make personal attacks. 

  43. PaulLemmen
    March 30th, 2012 @ 7:36 pm

     Nor will she as long as I have breath …

  44. PaulLemmen
    March 30th, 2012 @ 7:38 pm

     Me too, even if it’s only planning … and Fedoras

  45. PaulLemmen
    March 30th, 2012 @ 7:52 pm

    Thank you for the inclusion in your blogroll! Turn-about IS fair play …

  46. ThePaganTemple
    March 30th, 2012 @ 11:27 pm

    Pound sand? No, the most appropriate course of action is for me to express my opinion, which I did and will continue to do. And that opinion is, she’s a huckster and BlogCon is a con job. Stacy is a world class journalist with whom I have disagreed with, sometimes strongly, at various times, but I respect him and the work he tries to do. For her to refuse to invite him to the thing tells me something is seriously amiss. I think he makes way too much of it and takes it way too seriously, and that’s really what I’m trying to get across to him. It, and she, are not that damned important.