The Virginia political blogosphere is (mostly) a cesspool of incestuous, self-indulgent children with dreams of working from home so they don't have to get a real job. There, I said it. The secret's out. Sorry to blow ya'lls cover like that.

What the hell am I talking about? The Waldo Jacquith censorship scandal, of course.

First some background. Despite my above proclamation, I will admit that I have Waldo's Virginia Political Blogs aggregator in my news reader. Waldo wrote some code some time ago to take Virginia political blog content and put them all together into one handy news feed. If anyone wanted to participate, they just had to email Waldo or something and they'd be added to the aggregator. There's another aggregator out there, but I prefer Waldo's over the other one because it includes the full content so I don't have to leave the aggregator feed.

Anyway, thanks to Waldo's noble efforts, pretty much anyone with a blog can jump into his free aggregator and become famous without any special talents or knowledge, and take their shot at the brass ring of ad revenue.

Since the standards of entry are basically non-existent, you can imagine that approximately 97% of the Virginia political blogs in the aggregator are meme-copying crapfests. There's only 5 or 6 Virginia political blogs with original content and thoughtful prose that are worth reading, and I have them in separate feeds, so I find myself skimming or just plain ignoring most of the Virginia Political Blogs aggregator blogs. Especially the ones with "SWAC Girl" in the title. But I digress. Honestly I have no idea why the aggregator is still in my news reader. I suppose it's good for identifying memes in the Virginia blogosphere. For example, today the meme is clearly "The Great Gerald Ford died." Dozens of Virginia blog posts with that title are streaming through the aggregator today, all of them containing a poignant picture of Gerald Ford looking presidentially out of a window with a couple of unoriginal paragraphs about what a great man he was. I'd be willing to bet that many of those bloggers have not mentioned a single word about The Great Gerald Ford's world-altering accomplishments before today. Go figure.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure Ford was a great guy, but I didn't know him. Anyway, Gerald Ford is not the point of this post.

My point is... wait, actually, I've lost track of my point. I guess this is what editors are for. I think my point had something to do with the fact that Waldo has done a great (free) service to blogging political nobodies in Virginia with his (voluntary, free, ad-free) aggregator.

Now along comes General Grevious' Dog, the current darling of Virginia conservatives.

He started to get "famous" maybe a month ago. Bearing Drift jumped on The Dog bandwagon a few weeks ago, which I think started a chain-reaction of Dog Love Fests by conservative blogs. I think conservatives find him fascinating because he knows how to use Photoshop. In other words, The Dog is a conservative with some creativity. As we saw with Michelle Malkin's Hot Air, conservatives go into collective orgasmic bliss whenever they locate an artist with conservative ideals. It's like winning the lottery or something.

The Dog's schtick is posting Photoshop'ed pictures now and then which somehow promote conservative memes or mock liberal memes. His writing naturally comes out as extreme right-wing talk show militarism. Your basic Kill 'Em All And Let God Sort Them Out stuff. Think Hot Air, except with a much smaller budget, and a nerdy Star Wars theme.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Waldo and The Dog would collide. Perhaps it was destined. Perhaps it was even... planned. Well, probably not. Surely The Dog, an extreme right-wing militant Star Wars nerd hiding behind an anonymous pseudonym, would never have any cause to attack Waldo, a respected, well-spoken liberal who happens to vocally support gay rights. Nah.

It all started when The Dog posted a jihadist propaganda picture of a beheaded American, with some conservative drivel about "never forgetting." I guess he "forgot" that it was terrorist propaganda designed to make Americans too scared to fight. I think he was actually trying not to promote terrorist political ideals, but to express support for Sen. Goode's anti-Muslim rampages against Sen. Keith Ellison. I guess The Dog thinks Sen. Ellison is working for al Qaeda and is planning a head-chopping rampage in the Senate after he's sworn in with a Koran in January, and he's just trying to stop the carnage. I'm just guessing there, though. Who knows what The Dog's true motivations are. (Hyuk, hyuk. I can hardly write that with a straight face.)

Waldo, who also happens to be vocal in rebuking Sen. Goode for his anti-Muslim tirades, rightly decided that the beheaded American imagery was too disturbing and removed The Dog from the Virginia Political Blogs aggregator. He said it was the first time he'd ever made an editorial decision on the aggregator.

The Dog has taken the free publicity and run with it (without a word of thanks). His blog is now littered with indignant anti-liberal content about such tongue-in-cheek topics as free speech, censorship, jail, and... get this... copyright infringement. (I had no trouble navigating to his site, by the way, even from behind a fairly aggressive firewall.) He's even promoting a ban on Waldo's ad-free aggregator. He suggests everyone use the other, ad-supported Virginia aggregator. Hmmm. Interesting.

I'm not quite sure why I'm giving The Dog so much publicity here myself. Except that nobody reads my blog, so there's not much danger of pegging his site traffic meter. :) And it makes me feel better to pepper my writing with biting sarcasm.

Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a moderate commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.