Defending Patterico

As an anonymous blogger*, I can't support Patterico's outing of the traitor Tbogg, but I can certainly understand why he did it. It's kind of a slow period for those of us who serve in the Red Guard of Our Leader's Glorious Conservative Christian Cultural Revolution. With Congress heading into recess and more than three weeks left before the official start of the campaign season, there just aren't a lot of opportunities for us to act on our authoritarian impulses right now. We have to grab them wherever we can.

You all know what I'm talking about. As conservatives, it is in our nature to intimidate, bully, and kick the living shit out of those who fail to show proper respect for Our Leader and His enlightened policies. Dissenters like Tbogg disrupt the harmony of our universe, a place where strong authoritarian leaders issue commands for the rest of us to follow. They must be destroyed.

And because this inclination toward authoritarianism is a part of our basic psychological makeup, we are rewarded with certain physiological responses when we punish those who refuse to conform. To put it another way, bullying gets us off. It's how God blesses us for serving as volunteer state security apparatchiks.

I suspect that Patterico was in the thrall of a kind of frenzied pre-orgasmic state while he was dropping hints about about Tbogg's true identity. Every muscle in his body tightened a little more as he typed each clue, and by the time he was through, every synapse in his nervous system was straining--but also waiting like good conservative synapses for the brain's order--to fire. That moment came when Tbogg responded. Suddenly, all that built-up tension was released at once in one glorious orgasmic explosion of authoritarian accomplishment.

I also suspect Patterico had a cigarette afterward.

Soon, we'll have other opportunities for such release. We'll get our jollies disrupting Democratic campaign events, swiftboating Murtha, punching Joan Jett, and harrasing brown people at the polls. Then the blogger outings will cease.

So hate the sin, love the sinner. Paterrico could not control his authoritarian impulse any longer. He had to find release. That's something I think we can all understand, although we'd all still be happier if he'd just followed Deputy Dick's lead and betrayed a CIA agent.

*I'm not Fox's John Gibson. Really, I'm not. So stop listening to those rumors. And I'm not an idiot either. My series of reports on the War against Christmas was groundbreaking journalism. Really, it was. Stop smirking. Shut up. Well, you can all kiss my ass.

Update: That didn't take long. Within minutes of publishing this post, my profile received hits from three different people within a 42 second time span.