More like, now you see it, now you don’t. It appears that about two days ago (judging by Technorati’s link history), Tom Delay turned his old campaign url, TomDeLay.com, into a blog, and Sunday made his first post:
Welcome to TomDeLay.com and thank you for visiting my new blog. Over the course of my political life I have learned many things, one of which is that not all good ideas come from Washington, D.C.. In fact I think that most of the best ideas come from concerned citizens from all over The United States.
Unfortunately, many D.C. insiders are simply incapable of looking outside the capital beltway for fresh opinions and new approaches that might otherwise help our nation.
I have created this blog in order to provide Americans with a new meeting place where such opinions and viewpoints might be better shared, discussed and debated; a place where conservative and traditionalist Americans might speak truth to power and to one another.
In all honesty, I did not fully realize the impact or potential of the blogosphere until very recently, when Red State gave me the opportunity to post some of my observations in the wake of the recent midterm elections. The response I received was overwhelming, and I would like to again thank the fine people at that site.
This experience brought me to the immediate realization that I needed to become involved in the blogosphere. TomDelay.com is the culmination of my new found understanding.
I am both extremely excited and energized by this opportunity to meet with you here, in the online marketplace of ideas. I look forward to working in collaboration not competition with all those who already use blogs as a way to fight against and present an alternative to institutionalized liberal media bias.
I hope that you will return often. Thanks again.
Unfortunately for DeLay, among the first people to notice his outpost in the two-way land of citizen give-and-take, where people speak truth to power, were leading liberal sites like ThinkProgress and Crooks and Liars. In a little over an hour, TomDeLay.com was flooded with comments, nearly all of them negative, many of them flagrantly obscene (and some of them quite funny, like the person who said “everyone already assumes bloggers are unemployed losers…thanks for reinforcing that stereotype”).
Since then, DeLay’s first post has been taken down, along with 100+ comments. And comments have been disabled on his site. But if you want to read the entrails, you can go to TomDeLaydotcom.blogspot.com, where they have been preserved by a resourceful netizen.
What was DeLay thinking? That people wouldn’t talk back?
[Full disclosure: in addition to being related to the guy who started Technorati, I also worked with Public Campaign Action Fund on their DailyDeLay blog when it started in 2004-5.]UPDATE: Looks like they’ve turned the blog back on as of Monday morning.
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