In 2001 and 2002, I was reading and commenting on Dana Garret’s blog and Mike Mathews. There was also someone …Delacrat? who had a great wit, but didn’t stick with it. I was also trolling some Republicans pretty hard. Hube mostly. Like everyone I was shocked and outraged about how terrible George W. Bush was. About how he wanted to invade Iraq on a transparently flimsy pretext and with no plan for the occupation. (Little did I know that the GOP had not yet begun to scrape the bottom of the barrel.)
Anyway, my arms were to short to box with GWB, so I decide to keep an eye on Mike Castle who I discovered to be a straight down the line “Yes Man” for Bush in spite of his PR campaign to the contrary. I tricked Liberalgeek into coming aboard, then Pandora and Cassandra, Nemski, Donviti. El Somnambulo was a goldmine of a commenter for a long while before he came on board. Delaware Dem started “Daily Delaware” but decided to come over after a while. Those years were fun. Then Hillary Clinton came along and ruined America with her shit ass campaign. I think that’s how it went down.
This short piece in technically Delaware reminded me of all of that. Read Steve Newton’s post on outing. That’s one for the time capsule.
Nancy Willing, perhaps better known as the blogger behind The Delaware Way, talks about blogging in the aughts with nostalgia, as if it’s a long-past epoch (which, in blog years, it is).
“Delaware had a marvelous local blogging community back then,” Willing said, pointing out the old community traditions, such as Jason Scott’s “Around the Horn“ roundups on Delaware Liberal.
“Communications flowed freely — and mostly collegially — between both Dem and GOPer blogs,” Willing recalled. “That’s not to say everyone was in kumbaya land all the time.”
“One of the more unique aspects of Delaware bloggers in the 2000s was the growing use of actual names vs the sort of ‘Daily Kosian’ use of pseudonyms. Mike Matthews, myself, Dana Garrett and others consciously decided to shun pseudonyms. I remember the huge upset when someone outed Dave Burris, who is now running GOPer strategy in the Delaware Senate Republican Caucus. The folks at DelawareLiberal (and its 2017 off-shoot Blue Delaware) are still sticking with their fake names and have a strict policy against ‘outing’ any anonymous commenter.”
Delaware Libertarian posted in depth about the “inevitable bloodbath” of identity outing in the Delaware blogosphere in a 2009 post.
