I guess it wasn't going to be long before Daily Mail Man started flexing his, er, blog muscle and started firing both barrels in the latest Thanet Blog War. In today's post he returns to his broken record of attacking anonymous bloggers as 'cranks', 'paranoid', 'disturbed' and 'graffiti merchants'. As well as cranking out the same old, same old 'defamatory language' and 'personal abuse'.We heard it all before in the Thanet Blog War of 2006, the Thanet Blog War of 2007 and the Thanet Blog War of 2008. Now he's trotting it out again in the Thanet Blog War of 2009, aided and abetted it seems by his new and presumably useful (for the time being) but nonetheless strange bedfellow, Bignews Tony. I'm surprised he hasn't rolled out 'welfare sponger with a political axe to grind' but it's early days yet, I suppose.
As part of his diatribe, he characterises Thanet's blogs as little read and little cared about, and given greater emphasis than they deserve by local papers 'desperate for stories; any stories, true or false, given their own limited and shrinking resources.' What the good doctor has conveniently forgotten, however, (something he's quite good at) is that without these blogs, and just off the top of my head, we would never have heard of:
- Inconvenient truths about Tory councillors' academic qualifications
- Mad Pleasurama plans that embed people's heads in concrete
- Jollies-for-planning-permission trips to China by Thanet Tories
- Secret Tory plans for a Thanet blogging protocol
- Tory councillors who prefer to spend all their time in Panama
- Pollution of our water table by local companies
- Proposals to fly 747s over Ramsgate all night
- On/off/on/off again fast ferry services to Boulogne
- Council planning department disasters
To name but a few. But he wouldn't want to remember those, would he, as they all involve his corrupt and incompetent administration.
So obsessed is the man with getting some dirt on troublesome anonymous bloggers that during the last blog war he went to the extraordinary lengths of sourcing a photograph of one such 'annoyance', and running it past possible acquaintances for confirmation that he'd 'got his man'. If that's not the actions of an 'unhappy', 'paranoid' and 'disturbed individual' expressing 'the darker and more unpleasant side of human nature', I'm buggered if I know what is!
Click here for more guff from the Master of Convenient Political Truths
Update: At the suggestion of one of the few remaining Thanet bloggers I still actually have any respect for, I've hidden the comments on this post. I don't give a whatsit what people call me, it's water off a duck's proverbial, but I draw the line at anonymous name callers using my blog to insinuate named bloggers are paedos, even if they're the sort of bluggers I wouldn't ordinarily stop to relieve myself over if they were on fire. I've said this before, and I'll keep on saying it until you (and you know who you are) have got the message.
