Foghorn Leghorn strikes out: What if they gave a war — and nothing happened . . . ?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Well.

That was underwhelming.

First, I make a brutally funny, completely accurate joke about that risible demagogue, Keith at Housing Panic.

Then Keith offers to sell out his weblog and his entire constituency of mouth-breathing morons to escape the ridicule that is his just desserts, his one indisputable claim on the wonders of the universe.

His “offer” is essentially extortionate. The “or else”?:

A war with the thousands of HP’ers so harsh and loud your practice and reputation in Arizona likely wouldn’t survive (beyond the damage you’re doing yourself)

Now anyone who is paying any attention here — a company that excludes Generalissimo Foghorn Leghorn — could have predicted with perfect precision what I would do in the face of something like this: Make it public, of course, in spades.

So: Keith puts on a predictable pantomime of outsized outrage, heavy on the high-moral dudgeon. And the mouth-breathing morons zoom in to BloodhoundBlog to poke around at random and issue inane comments — heavy on the profanity, light on the grammar.

This much is a big yawn. There are thoughtful, intelligent people among the BubbleHeads, but I can’t imagine that any of them is so lacking in self-respect that he would take “orders” from a detestable thug like Generalissimo Leghorn.

That’s as may be. The thuglets who do shake a leg the Leghorn way gave another perfect demonstration of why I have referred to them as Brown Shirts and Flying Monkeys. One Junior G-Man dug up and published my address (ahem — it’s on our web site) here and on Housing Panic. An amazingly drunk man in Connecticut left 23 very long incoherent voicemails on my cell phone. A cadre of relatively literate BubbleHeads tried to figure our how to censor me by means of Arizona Association of Realtors or Arizona Department of Real Estate complaints. It might occur to you to wonder if they have not heard of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution — but of course they have. Thuggery and principle are moral opposites, never doubt it.

There’s more, but it’s all nothing. I told Keith in advance that it would come to nothing. The original post stands. Forever will it be known that the modus vivendi of Keith at Housing Panic is Masturbating to Armageddon. If the jack-off had any sense, he’d steal it like every other joke I’ve written for him. It would make an excellent title for his autobiography, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Note also that I am unscathed. I stood alone — really the only way I know how to stand — against everything Generalissimo Foghorn Leghorn could bring to bear, and I bore no injuries. Keith has never laid a glove on me and he never will. Why? Well for one thing, I’ve fought and won against trolls who actually had more than two brains cells to rub together. But for another — and I told them this a long time ago — there is no heckler’s veto on the internet. The fact is that I had all kinds of power in reserve — deleting comments, banning particular commenters, cutting off comments — that I did not and would never use. One idiot kept insisting that I had killed her comments, and, when I proved that I had not, bitched that I had revealed her fake email addresses. Oh, well…

The Flying Monkeys are mostly gone for now, and they are free to stay gone. But they are free to return, too. We are smart, thoughtful people here, and minds eager to learn can pick up a lot. If they elect to behave badly, they may, in the fullness of time, discover how easy they are to ignore. Reality comes to us with an unanswerable elegance, each of us in our own time.

Thanks to Jeff Brown and Jay Thompson, particularly, for bearding the chicken as it were. Jay, Todd Tarson, Tyler Sookochoff and Jonathan Dalton all had posts on this disappointing little war. Tyler expresses confusion as to means and motive, and Jonathan suggests an alternate strategy:

Maybe, just maybe we as a group ought to take on the bubbleheads en masse the next time they strike.

I understand the sentiment, but I think this would be a mistake. Ganging up in any form ratifies and dignifies Keith’s thuggish philosophy. I am able to stand down the entire Flying Monkey army precisely because the principle of justice is entirely mine: I have every right to speak my mind freely, without fear of domination. We owe this ideal not to Lincoln or Jefferson or John Locke but to Socrates himself: Even when the thugs seem to have won, they lose.

We don’t answer crime with crime, we answer crime with justice. And to aid in Tyler’s understanding, what is the prefect justice for Keith’s ludicrous, posturing thuggery?: Ridicule, of course. He is nothing without that crowd of thuglets around him — and his greatest fear is that they, too, are laughing at him behind his back. As they have wits, they are. The man is the living personification of a joke.

Even so, not much of a war. Sunday to Tuesday — and really only Sunday. I was too busy to have as much fun as I might have had, otherwise, but I didn’t get to pick the schedule. No honest man can doubt that I won — “Masturbating to Armageddon” is still posted and my career is unscathed. But if a few more men of honor have left the Legions of Leghorn, that is the real victory…

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