I Am Spartacus!

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

My fellow Dharmatists, we have been called out (warning: this link and the next provide traffic/revenue to RedState).  No less a rightist luminary than Erick Erickson, Obergruppenführer of scrappy little RedState.com, has revealed the hitherto-unthinkable: that left-wing bloggers might be communicating by e-mail!!!

But this particular leftie roach isn’t going to scurry for the darkness, now that the Light of Truth has shone upon me – I’m going to out in a blaze of glory, basking in the freedom of having nothing more to hide, and I invite you to do the same.  Let us together declare our membership in the dread JournoList!  Let us all stand and be counted!  Let us all shout, “I AM SPARTACUS!”

The neo-blackshirts are all in a tizzy, thinking they smell blood in the water.  They’re convinced Olberman is in on it; Shuster, too.  Ezra Klein seems to be a veritable font of information, as is a story from yesterday morning’s Politico – which means for us, my fellow travelers, the gig is up.  We’re exposed.  The wingnuts have caught us e-mailing one another, and they’ve pulled out the terms “creepy” and “sinister” to describe it.  All is lost.

You got me, Erick Erickson.  I’m a member of JournoList (even a charter member, if you want) and several other Illuminati leftocommiefascist e-mail groups which you haven’t yet uncovered, but are surely closing in on.  Through these e-mail lists, we of the left blogosphere are, as you have since yesterday suspected, plotting and scheming toward our eventual goal of re-creating the worker’s paradise that was the USSR in the 1930s.  We devilishly chortle at our plans for the priestly class – Civil Constitution of the Clergy, anyone? – as well as the prospect of implementing our longstanding goals of disarming the citizenry, finding new ways of providing abortions, and establishing a government agency that’ll outsource the job of scratching the word “God” off of every piece of legal tender in circulation.

We’re not limited to domestic issues, of course; sometimes we talk foreign policy.  We have had long discussions regarding which nations deserve the friendship of the United States, and which ones we should capitulate to.  We speculate obsequiously on who among current world leaders will be the best Overlord of North America, and how we can pave the way for more and better terrorists to enter our land and attack our people.  Mostly, though, we just sit around and wonder if the Europeans think we’re as cool, composed, and sagacious as they actually are.

It’s likely that none of this so far surprises you, Mr. Erikson, but this might: we’re all closet fans of both Walker, Texas Ranger and 24, which we secretly believe it to be an accurate portrayal of a typical day in the life of an anti-terrorist agent.  Although we can’t say so publicly for obvious reasons, the bulk of us think that Jack Bauer should be put in charge of Homeland Security.  Chuck Norris we like because we’ve come to see him not as a B-list entertainer with a penchant for corny lines and reactionary politics, but as the same rock-solid, tough-guy nativist know-nothing martial artist that you guys are so fond of.  Chuck Norris: the kind of badass we should all be taking political advice from.  

Hey, that reminds me: how’s Nugent these days?

You were wondering who’s on the list, o right-wing truth-seekers?  Putting aside for the moment the right-asserted fact that you guys have us surrounded – which ought to have made figuring out who we are pretty easy – I’ll boil it down for you: we’re all in on it.  You stumbled upon the tip of the Vast Left Wing Echo Iceberg (or something), but you don’t yet realize how vast it is.  

Everyone who voted for Obama, ever felt an ounce of compassion for their fellow human beings, or ever thought an other-than-hateful thought about Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, or John Maynard Keynes receives an e-mail every morning (NOTE: many of the truly ate-up – the inner circle, and elite praetorians like the “trusted users” at Daily Kos – have gone ahead and gotten the implant to receive instructions directly, but this won’t be mandatory for the rest of the population until 2010).  That e-mail, the return address for which is always obscured but originates from a server at Miskatonic University, tells us the day’s message, spin, and secret Obedience Codes, which we use to discern our individual role in the day’s propagandizing.  Sometimes we are told to attack conservative ideology, but more often it’s to invent some baseless charge to level against some pure-as-the-driven-snow Republican.  Once we’ve got something good cooked up, we pass our talking points along to our willing accomplices in the press, who we see at secret commie gatherings occurring right beneath your noses twice a week.  I’m really surprised you haven’t heard us singing The Internationale.  

The left-leaning press, which always takes the word of Democrats as gospel anyway, gratefully receives our daily talking points and prints them as news.  There is no quid-pro-quo involved, as the people in the press are so far to the left that they think Che Guevarra was a goose-stepping fascist.  We can count on the Old Media to always support and defend us, because we know the strength of their conviction to the cause of resurrecting the spirit of the post-Prague Spring era – nothing will stop them, or us, from degrading the American spirit to the point that we become the butt of Yakov Smirnov jokes.

So congratulations, RedStaters – you caught us!  Markos and Olberman talked freely about it last night, as was reported by Jed Lewison‘s Shhhh! Markos gave up our conspiracy secrets on Countdown!, and even today, Mr. Erickson is still flogging this DOA story in an effort to resuscitate some sense of Republican outrage at catching Dems doing the obvious – you’re welcome to click on Olbermann and Kos Nurse Wounded Pride, if you’re okay with actually visiting RedState (and provided you can tolerate arguments based on “everybody’s ignoring me, so what I’m saying must be true!”-based “logic”).

As for the rest of us, we stand before the mighty investigative bloggers of the wingnutosphere, naked and ashamed, but with enough honor intact to hold fast to that concept of ownership laid down so eloquently by Roman slaves in that Oscar-winning 1960 film:  

I am a Liberal!  

I am on the JournoList!  

I am Spartacus!

I AM SPARTACUS!