Thursday, August 28

Disclaimer.



I'd been thinking about putting something like this up for a while, and the last part of this post at Snarkastic finally inspired to get it all out there. Warning: weapons-grade soapboxing ahead.

It's been a busy week for me. Tuesday night I had Hillary's DNC speech on in the background while we were doing our fantasy-football draft; last night my attention was divided between assembling the roundtable roundup and watching the Democrats nominate by acclimation the first minority presidential candidate of a major party in American history. And tonight I expect I'll be flipping back and forth between Barack Obama's acceptance speech and South Carolina-N.C. State on ESPN.

These three days should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about where my head's going to be at the next three months. Between the most expectations-laden Georgia football season since I became a Georgia fan and the most important presidential election of my lifetime, I'm going to have a lot occupying my time and attention.

That last sentence probably sounded stupid to a lot of you, but perhaps for different reasons. Some of you are no doubt wondering, "How can you be concerned about football when there's an election going on?" while others are muttering, "God, shut up about the fucking Democrats and get back to the football already." I know there are more than a few people out there who share both my Dawg-love and my enthusiastic intention to vote for Obama in November; I also know there are plenty of readers of this blog who are diehard Dawg fans but would sooner allow themselves to be circumcised by Tim Tebow than vote for a Democrat, just as there are plenty of readers who love talking liberal politics but couldn't give less of a shit about football if you put guns to their heads.

Well -- how to put this gently? -- you're all just going to have to suck it up.

There's going to be a lot of football on this blog over the next few months, the majority of it Georgia-centered. There's also going to be a fair amount of politics, which will skew markedly toward the liberal pro-Obama side. And while that may indeed be a weird marriage, the fortunate thing is that most of you seem to be intelligent, thinking people capable of tuning out, rather than throwing a pissy snit fit over, the stuff you don't like. You're a liberal who has no interest in my thoughts on how Knowshon Moreno will fare against South Carolina's front seven? Ignore it and move on. You're high off the vapors of the Dawgs' most recent victory and have no time to hear me explain why Obama's foreign-policy judgment is superior to McCain's? To steal a line from Jay-Z, if you don't like my lyrics you can press fast-forward. You're grown-ups, you know how to do this.

Well, let me back that up a second. You don't have to ignore it. No matter what your sporting or political affiliations are, you're welcome to participate in any discussion taking place in any comments thread you find interesting, whether your opinion jibes with mine or not (as long as you can do better than "georga sux" or "HUSSEIN Obama = muzlim"). All I'll do is make a couple of eminently reasonable requests.

• Don't tell me what to blog about. I don't come to your shack in the middle of the woods and tell you what to put in your latest batch of meth; don't come to my blog and tell me to stop writing about (or write more about) X, Y, or Z. I don't make enough money off this blog to care whether the daily readership drops to single digits, so I'm going to write about what I'm going to write about, and if for whatever reason my conflation of sports minutia with political haranguing so offends you that you can't take it anymore, feel free to patronize another blog. E-mail me and I'll even suggest a few good ones that won't offend your sensibilities.

• Stay on topic. Here are two specific examples of what not to be: Don't be that unfunny asshole who tries to score Clever Points by injecting political attacks into a sports discussion, i.e., "Wow, you sure laid into Central Michigan for being weak on defense, too bad you won't hold Obama accountable for being the same way LOL ROFL PWN3D ETC ETC!!11!!!" Similarly, don't be the nannying wannabe peacemaker who tries to defuse a particularly heated political debate by throwing unrelated sports stuff in there: "Hey, wow, uh, how 'bout everybody calm down and let's talk about Georgia's chances against the Gators, huh?!?" We don't need that. Now, I've never banned people from commenting before and have no intention of starting, but I can tell you with some degree of certainty that if you bring either of those tactics into a comments thread, you're not going to change anyone's mind or make any friends; you're only going to look like a douche.

Again, commenters who run afoul of these conditions will not be banned, but they will be referred back to this post as a reminder, and mocked as necessary.

Look, I'm not trying to be an asshole here. Even in the moments when I'm working up a good purple-faced rage over something, be it politics or football, I have a lot of fun writing this blog, and my only real goal in doing so is for y'all to have fun too. But I can't make any legally binding guarantees of fun, so you're kind of proceeding at your own risk. If you're a big enough boy (or girl) to handle that and be civil even about the stuff you disagree with, excellent. If not . . . maybe you should start exploring other options.



Lecture over; enjoy the football season/election/both/neither. As for me, the potent combination of stress over the future of our country and stress over Georgia's national-title hopes may be enough to put me in the ICU in the very near future. But as long as I live long enough to see President Barack Obama invite the 2008 BCS National Champion Georgia Bulldogs to the White House, I can die happy.

13 comments:

Jen said...

"I know there are more than a few people out there who share both my Dawg-love and my enthusiastic intention to vote for Obama in November."

Hell yes! And.. go dawgs!

Josh M. said...

I've finally decided. I prefer to think of Obama as "the first half-white candidate."

Jason said...

You know what's strange? I'm doing the exact same thing right now - watching Obama's bio swing by on the TV, watching South Carolina's atrocious offense against NC State's equally atrocious offense, and checking my e-mail.

Holly said...

I thought a lot about this site when I was writing that post. Doug, I wish I had the grace and hospitality you display here with those who don't share your beliefs. I just can't muster it, not this year, but I admire the capacity for compassion I find in others who share my leanings.

Anonymous said...

Most poignant moment of the night?

McCain's congratulatory ad, hands down. Pure class. Brilliant!

Best line of the convention?

"Hillary's been screwed by potentially two first black presidents."

Anonymous said...

The best line of the convention was "George Bush was born on third base then stole second"

Not caring about the SC game I watched the convention flipping back to the Titans/Packers preseason game, and not because my friend cheers for them. Well actually only because my friend cheers for them.

Anyway, you left off a group, those of us that back Obama and are into college football, but don't care about Georgia except in how the Dawgs effect our schedule.

Anonymous said...

Doug - can we expect some state by state breakdowns or electoral math discussion in the upcoming months?

I always find those more interesting than "blah blah blah, cap and trade" or "blah blah blah, we can't retreat now" policy discussions.

Good stuff - as a consistent reader who's comfortably right of center I think the upcoming months will be damn compelling.

Joel said...

Hey, wow, uh, how 'bout everybody calm down and let's talk about Georgia's chances against the Gators, but with Obama as our starting left tackle, huh?!?

Anonymous said...

Hey Doug, you know what would really rock my socks off? Mebbe a guest-blog by sis about a woman's point of view on McCain's choice for Veep? Because I am really trying hard to wrap my brain around that one.

Anonymous said...

Yeah it's hard for a liberal to get their brains around how one woman could be a:

Beauty queen
Sports star
PTA president
City councilwoman
Mayor
Ethics board chairwoman
Governor
Reformer
Tax cutter
Mother of five
Former USW union member
Married for 20 years

Add:

Vice President of these United States.

Can't wait for liberal women to start trashing her. Ditz Ditz Myers has already started the drum beat.

Anonymous said...

Fellow Dawg Fans Who Care About Politics:

Would you rather UGA win the MNC this year, OR your preferred candidate win the presidency?

I'll take the MNC, because for all the huffing and puffing from both sides, the differences between teh candidates are mainly on the margins. Besides, there's another election in 4 years anyway (and if the Republicans could make it through Clinton and the Democrats could make it through W., then we will all survive, no matter what), but its been 20+ years since UGA even seriously sniffed at being #1. And think of the misery we endured for many of those years. How many in a row did we lose to UT? What's our record over the last 17 years against UF? Did we really lose 3 in a row against Tech?

So I say to all Dawg fans, remember life is all about priorities, and in this, as with so much else in life, the #1 priority is UGA.

Anonymous said...

Wrong. The #1 priority is to keep liberals out of office, any office.

Astronaut Mike Dexter said...

New definition of "irony," or maybe just "obliviousness": A Republican who says liberal women are going to trash a Republican woman just because she doesn't agree with them, then turns around and refers to a liberal as "Ditz Ditz Myers."