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.