Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

How stupid are these people?

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

The lights are all blinking red.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Caught trolling

Caught trolling

by | 74 Comments

This post is in: 

I’m geting in the spirit of threads where people call me a pathetic clown. And also too her answer is kind of revealing, IHMO.

Q.

WHERE DID ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE GO?

ask this more in sorrow and in anger. I read you every day because you’re an oasis from the hate and anger that fills so much of the media these days. Whether it’s Republican presidential candidates physically threatening Ben Bernanke or anonymous Daily Kos commenters comparing Bush to Hitler, it’s bad on both sides. As a principled Burkean moderate centrist independent, this hurts me. I wanted to ask: where did all the good people go? And if David Broder is looking down on us from heaven, what does he think about the state of the nation? Keep up the good work. Peace.
– September 11, 2012 11:31 AM Permalink

A.

ALEXANDRA PETRI :

Possibly I am multiple-times burned and twice shy, but I sense a false equivalence embedded in your question, and the mention of David Broder (where’s “post-punk” this week? I hope it’s feeling all right!) sends it over the edge.

Look, I certainly am not trying to buy into the idea that anything bizarre said on one side has to be “balanced” by something equally bizarre from the other, regardless of source. That’s not real balance.

But this idea that unless you were darting around finding obscure scurrilous remarks in message boards on one side, you would only ever be writing about the inane statements from the other — that’s false, too. There’s no monopoly on idiocy.

Regardless, I hope you have a pleasant day and “post-punk” makes a speedy recovery!

– September 11, 2012 12:16 PM

For the record, I only called her “post-punk David Broder” in a chat once, so she must have read about it here on Balloon Juice to think of it as a meme.

Reader Interactions

74Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    Heh. Busted.

    Guess it’s probably time to retire ‘Burkean’ and ‘David Broder’; it looks like they’re on to your game.

  2. 2.

    Baud

    BUSTED!

    ETA: Seconds late.

    ETA2: I wonder if a memo has been sent around to all the Villagers warning them about DougJ. I would pay to see a copy of it.

  6. 6.

    James Gary

    But this idea that unless you were darting around finding obscure scurrilous remarks in message boards on one side, you would only ever be writing about the inane statements from the other—that’s false, too. There’s no monopoly on idiocy.

    Ha! See? BOTH SIDES DO IT!!!!!

    If nothing else, one must at least grant the Villagers a modicum of respect for their badger-like tenacity with respect to certain sacred and cherished memes.

  8. 8.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker

    I’m convinced these people have google alerts (I think that’s the phrase) tied to their names. Tweety knows he’s Tweety, David Gregory knows he’s a nitwit with hair, Van de Hei (sp?) knows he’s the pool boy, etc.

    Also, too, Governor Romney, who pledged to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy when it suited him and who we should be nice to because his kids love him, discusses parenthood with a constituent in 2004

    GOODRIDGE: Governor Romney, tell me — what would you suggest I say to my 8 year-old daughter about why her mommy and her ma can’t get married because you, the governor of her state, are going to block our marriage?
    ROMNEY: I don’t really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don’t you just tell her the same thing you’ve been telling her the last eight years

    He is not a good man, there is something deeply wrong with him.

  9. 9.

    clayton

    Viva DougJ!

    Your name lives forever.

    I doubt she knows from where you come.

    She probably thinks you are some new young punk on the intertubes with a blog now.

    HeeHee.

  11. 11.

    lamh35

    Putin ‘Grateful’ To Romney

    Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said he was “grateful” to Mitt Romney for saying Russia remained the United States’ “No. 1 geopolitical foe” because the remark actually helped Putin in missile defense negotiations, reports ABC News:

    “I’m grateful to him (Romney) for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems,” Putin told reporters, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

    “The most important thing for us is that even if he doesn’t win now, he or a person with similar views may come to power in four years. We must take that into consideration while dealing with security issues for a long perspective,” he said, speaking after a meeting with Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic, according to Interfax news agency.

  12. 12.

    hhex65

    Love “more in sorrow and in anger” classic 1950s crank LTE ref.

    Who’s Trollin’ Who?
    Guess you believed the world
    Played by your rules
    Here stands an experienced girl
    I ain’t nobody’s fool

  14. 14.

    Steve

    The kids are too Internet-savvy these days. You can still keep mocking the old people, they’ll never figure out the scam.

  15. 15.

    Comrade Mary

    @Comrade Mary: OK, it matters enough that I went and checked.

    By this point the plaintiff’s stories had been widely covered by national media — in particular, Julie Goodridge’s heartrending tale of how her then-partner, Hillary, was denied hospital visitation following the precarious birth of daughter Annie. It was the ignorance of these facts — and Romney’s inaccurate, insensitive answer to her parting question, that pushed Julie Goodridge to her breaking point.

    “I looked him in the eye as we were leaving,” recalls Goodridge. “And I said, ‘Governor Romney, tell me — what would you suggest I say to my 8 year-old daughter about why her mommy and her ma can’t get married because you, the governor of her state, are going to block our marriage?’”
    __
    His response, according to Goodridge: “I don’t really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don’t you just tell her the same thing you’ve been telling her the last eight years.”
    __
    Romney’s retort enraged a speechless Goodridge; he didn’t care, and by referring to her biological daughter as “adopted,” it was clear he hadn’t even been listening. By the time she was back in the hallway, she was reduced to tears.

    So, yeah, whether or not she conceived and bore the girl, her daughter would be her daughter. But given that it was a difficult birth and that her partner had been denied hospital visitation due to the law, that “adoptive” was either deeply careless or deeply, deliberately hurtful.

  16. 16.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker

    @Comrade Mary: Yup. He is a nasty, hollow man.

    DougJ, weren’t you well known in those chats? I think I came to Balloon Juice because people at Eschaton were cutting and pasting your “Rochester” comments.

  17. 17.

    Richard

    Think of how the late Broder must sadly be looking down from the sky, pining to eat of Karl Rove’s quail once more.

  19. 19.

    piratedan

    kinda torn between two thoughts… either they’re so wrapped up in themselves that they check every possible self reference that may take place on the web that might refer to them… or they’re so indifferent to it all that you’re something they would scrape off the bottom of their boots…..

  21. 21.

    JPL

    @clayton:

    She probably thinks you are some new young punk on the intertubes with a blog now.

    well duh.. but does she know he looks like a Kennedy?

  22. 22.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Haha, she’s a wily one, DougJ. But let’s be honest, if “principled Burkean moderate centrist independent” wasn’t a dead giveaway, it was certainly a clear indication there was something seriously wrong with the questioner.

  24. 24.

    trollhattan

    @Ryan:
    +1. This makes my week, and it’s only Tuesday–henceforth Dougzday.

    Pro tip: she’s ripe to learn of Metrosexual Black Abraham Lincoln.

  25. 25.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Ryan:

    My wife made me read it aloud and didn’t get it.

    I tried to share it with Mrs. Fuckhead but when I got caught up in a 15 minute explanation of Burke, Strauss and Hayek, I suddenly said “nevermind, it isn’t important.”

    ETA: Sorry, left out Oakeshott.

  31. 31.

    handy

    I keep trying to think what post punk David Broder sounds like, and all I can think is Discipline era King Crimson.

  34. 34.

    J.W. Hamner

    Is this outrage about “both sides do it” just working the refs or what? You’ve always seemed to wish that Dems had the stones/lack of scruples to play as dirty, mean, and dishonest as the GOP… and you only have ever sneered at an calls for “civil discourse” or whatever. So what’s the deal here? You don’t feel the WaPo chats fully appreciate the sheer numbers of “tote baggers” that need to be beat down before you succeed in getting that false equivalence turned into an actual equivalence?

  35. 35.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Just Some Fuckhead:

    it was certainly a clear indication there was something seriously wrong with the questioner.

    Nevermind, I read the rest of the WaPo chat. There’d be no way to single out one crazy writer.

  36. 36.

    James Gary

    @Just Some Fuckhead: if “principled Burkean moderate centrist independent” wasn’t a dead giveaway, it was certainly a clear indication there was something seriously wrong with the questioner.

    I think “Burkean” was the tell here. Substitute “bipartisan” and it probably would’ve gone unnoticed.

  37. 37.

    trollhattan

    I vote for shifting to trolling from the Widner Library, seeking Oakeshottian succor. And equivalence, always equivalence.

  38. 38.

    Sly

    There’s a panoply of shameless wankery at your disposal. You can always change it up with references to Richard Cohen and Chuck Lane, or call her the Oakeshott of Fourth-Wave Feminism.

  39. 39.

    Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)

    But this idea that unless you were darting around finding obscure scurrilous remarks in message boards on one side, you would only ever be writing about the inane statements from the other—that’s false, too. There’s no monopoly on idiocy.

    That’s the thing that pisses me off no end. I don’t know of anybody who thinks there’s a “monopoly on stupidity”. All people say dumb shit, all the time, every day. Hell, I do, myself. But there’s a yawning gap between random commenters like us on blogs like this one writing foul mouthed, vituperative things, and politicians in high office saying them. Those are nothing alike. And, shit, all the politicians in high office saying dumb, offensive, even vituperative–and even, now and then–foul mouthed things are Republicans. I mean, what the fuck, that’s just true. It is. It might not be nice or civil or Burkean or Aspenesque or evenhanded, and it doesn’t reek of bipartisan comity, but it is true.

    But too many reporters and columnists know the asshole Republicans who hold office, and they see them at parties, and, hell, they like them, they’re so courtly and nice and everything. So they don’t care that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III is a fucking racist, because he’s just so damned nice when they see each other. Shit, some dumb fucking asshole columnist–I don’t know who–wrote fondly of how Strom Thurmond groped her ass and her daughter’s ass at a party or something, and she just laughed it off! ‘Cause it was just good old Senator Strom, being his lusty, cheeky self! I mean it was all in good fun! Just like when he raped the woman who worked at his house and never acknowledged his daughter she bore. Hell, I guess that was all in good fun, too! I’m sure good old Strom had a great old time raping her.

    These people, our press, would rather be buddies with the psychopaths they should be dragging out into the light than, well, dragging them out into the light. We need to go back to the days when reporters were surly, foul-mouthed, maybe even vituperative assholes who drank too much–the women, too–and hated the sons of bitches they wrote about. Those writers would sooner have pulled their own heads off than go to a party with Senators Sessions or Thurmond–or any Democratic senators, either. We need a mean, nasty, bastard press, not a bunch of fun-loving, social climbing suckups.

  42. 42.

    chrismealy

    DougJ, if you’re really getting into their heads then you must continue! And keep posting your troll output here, I love it.

  43. 43.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):

    We need to go back to the days when reporters were surly, foul-mouthed, maybe even vituperative assholes who drank too much—the women, too—and hated the sons of bitches they wrote about. Those writers would sooner have pulled their own heads off than go to a party with Senators Sessions or Thurmond—or any Democratic senators, either. We need a mean, nasty, bastard press, not a bunch of fun-loving, social climbing suckups.

    Honest question: when was this the case? I mean, it’s not like Hearst or McCormick were models of integrity. Weren’t most early American newspapers founded specifically to support a given party? I’d say the Hunter S. Thompsons and H.L. Menckens of history were the exceptions, not the rule.

  44. 44.

    chrismealy

    DougJ, weren’t you well known in those chats? I think I came to Balloon Juice because people at Eschaton were cutting and pasting your “Rochester” comments.

    Anybody have links? I gotta see those.

  45. 45.

    replicnt6

    @Just Some Fuckhead: Mrs6 is out of town. I expect that the first thing out of her mouth when she calls me this evening is going to be “Did you see DougJ got nailed trolling Petri?”

    You’re like the serial killer who wants to get caught. Troll her. Tell her you trolled her. Then try trolling her again. (Kinda sounds like the recipe for a good presentation: tell them what your going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them).

    There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.

  46. 46.

    Little Boots

    and again I have to ask.

    who the hell doesn’t like doug?

    if someone thinks he’s the “angry liberal”, well, what can we say.

  47. 47.

    James E. Powell

    People like this who are wedded to the “both sides do it” attitude cannot be moved to acknowledge that they are promoting false equivalence. When anyone complains or points out their errors, the simply remark that if they are getting complaints from both sides, they must be doing something right.

  50. 50.

    James E. Powell

    @Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):

    These people, our press, would rather be buddies with the psychopaths they should be dragging out into the light than, well, dragging them out into the light.

    Dragging bad people and their evil deeds into the light is no way to get a big-time job with big-time money. The right-wingers can make anyone too toxic to hire.

  53. 53.

    Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)

    @Spaghetti Lee:

    I guess I had in mind the muckrakers. I mean, I know that’s going back a way, and I guess a lot of them, being in the temperance movement didn’t drink, but still; they sure didn’t spend much time at parties in Georgetown. Maybe part of it–the drinking, antisocial bastard part–is kind of a stereotype, and maybe they weren’t ever too prevalent in the established press, but that’s what we need more of.

  60. 60.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist and Fact Checker

    Bill Maher on Birtherism, Broderian Balance, and Brokaw:
    How did it grow to the point where half of Republican primary voters believed it? It wasn’t just the silence of Republican leaders, it was the failure of people like Tom Brokaw to just dismiss it as racism from the beginning. People like him are always championing “balance” over objectivity. They have to bring everything back to a discussion about how “both sides” are guilty, instead of doing his job as a referee. If every single journalist just simply labeled birtherism what it obviously is — racism — the cancer wouldn’t have infected half the party. Maybe 25% or so, but most would be like, “Okay, this isn’t socially respectable.”

  61. 61.

    David Koch

    1. invoke some classic Broderisms, like “the President should meet the Republicans half way by accepting their entire plan.”

    2. talk about how Morning Joe is the most balanced and objective show on politics

    3. how losing Scott Brown would be a blow to comity

    4. how great this country would be with Netanyahu as president

    5. How historians will consider George W. Bush a great president in 20 years.

    6. how talking about abortion and gay marriage is a distraction from real issues.

  62. 62.

    arguingwithsignposts

    But this idea that unless you were darting around finding obscure scurrilous remarks in message boards on one side, you would only ever be writing about the inane statements from the other—that’s false, too. There’s no monopoly on idiocy.

    Can someone explain exactly what the hell this means?

  63. 63.

    Reklam

    DougJ, I say this with sincere admiration. Post-punk David Broder was pure genius. But don’t just keep playing “Heroin” to the NY Stars & DC squares who have now caught up. (e.g. Broder/Burke/etc.) Keep bringing it to the next level. Though not to Lulu, ok?

    Though I think GOS/Hitler is “Perfect Day” and can be on the set-list forever.

  67. 67.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @handy:

    A random GOS commentor comparing Bush to Hitler is exactly the same as Romney making birther jokes. Ergo, idiocy abounds and—voila—both sides do it.

    No, Obama making a birth certificate joke was the other side of the both sides do it. Because why in the hell should black people be the only ones allowed to joke about their birth certificate?

  71. 71.

    SectarianSofa

    Funny as fuck and desperately sad.

    @taylormattd:
    “And this actually makes me like her a bit more.”
    No. Don’t.

    Nothing will change until she admits she has a problem and seeks treatment for it. (Ibogaine? Vow of poverty? Ten-year Himalayan retreat?)
    She has an unhealthy obsession with herself, like most most of these nitwits. The fact that she noticed she was being mocked doesn’t change the fact that she keeps writing post-punk Broderesque grotesqueries.

  73. 73.

    Violet

    @DougJ: This trolling was too obvious and too similar to the previous one. Both “Burkean” and David Broder? Gotta mix it up. Talk about bipartisanship. Go with “the tone in Washington is so negative and this campaign is unprecedented in its meanness” or some crap. More in sorrow than in anger, of course.

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