From the “creators” of Southpaw Beagle, we wish all of our friends, and their respective families, the happiest of Thanksgivings….

…and for the following individuals….

Mitch McConnell,  George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Willow Palin, Todd Palin, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, all Republican Reps from Texas, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas,  Clarence Thomas’ wife, John Roberts,  Samuel Alito, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachman, Gov. Rick Perry (Texas), Rep Steve King (Iowa), Tom Tancredo, Dick Armey, Freedom Works, Teabaggers everywhere, all religious nuts, Rand Paul, and a whole bunch of peckerwood asswipes who manage to make America a more unpleasant place to live than it otherwise would and should be…..we wish you a great big….. (please feel free to add more names to the list)

FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hippie4ever recently (on these very pages, I’m proud to say), announced his permanent departure from Huffington Post as a commenter.  This caused me to reflect on a subject that has been on my mind of late:  why do people leave Huffington Post?  And on a more personal note, why yours truly has lost interest in it (I have, by the way).

But I’d like to make it clear that  this is not going to be a rant against Arianna or  the moderators.  This will be one man’s examination of, what I believe is, a noticeably diminished quality of a blog, or a blog that was a facade to begin with, that, with its continuous tinkering, has become the blog equivalent of Michael Jackson’s face: “tinkered” to the point that it, like Michael, has turned itself  into a monster that is no longer iconic but rather emblematic of the overall deterioration of America around us.  For me I found myself feeling increasingly bad with each visit to HP…unlike in the past when it was a rather pleasant experience.  And why endeavor in something (when one has a choice) if it feels bad.

So why do people leave Huffington Post?  Of course there are many simple answers to that question:  they get bored, banned, or busy.  All of those, of course, are valid.  But judging by the exponential increase of people visiting here who have,  simultaneously, either decreased their daily participation in HP visits or quit altogether, I have a different theory:  people quit…..because they have outgrown Huffington Post.

Obviously the badges, “community pundit/moderator” designations, and all the rest of the whistle and bells crap HP has employed the last year, are annoying to many but they’ve done all of this for a reason:  to serve as cover for a diminished and/or seriously flawed product….kind of like adding a boatload of MSG to crap Chinese buffet food to make it taste better than the dogshit that it really is.  Or, have you ever noticed how those quickie payday loan places, that spring up like cancer in the downtrodden and gray neighborhoods of America, neighborhoods that so desperately need color in their lives, are always brightly painted with green and yellow and shine like a brand new penny?  It’s to draw our most vulnerable in like ants at a picnic so that they may hand over their car title and/or first-born against 45 % interest in a happy place as opposed to handing it over to Vito, your friendly neighborhood loan shark, down by the docks.   That’s what HP has become….just like every fucking thing else about America:  just whistles and bells…and buttons, and badges, and rewards for being good…..and banishment for those who are bad.  But at the end of the day what have you got?  Not much more substance than that plate of Kung Pao chicken masquerading as food that you just wolfed down at the $5.95 all-you-can-eat buffet masquerading as Chinese cuisine.  The only thing that makes HP worse than the brightly colored  “loan shark” happy shops and the Chinese dog food buffets is that HP still poses as sophisticated because they got “you-know-who” at the helm (and what’s more sophisticated than a Greek siren who looks like she just walked off the yacht of Aristotle Onassis but actually talks as if she has a brain).  But when you strip away all of the “sophistication”, all you really have is half-baked, terribly written, and poorly researched journalism (and believe me…it is poorly researched).  The only reasons you don’t know more about the shoddy work of HP is 1.) Because no one seems to ever take the time to properly follow-up on their lack of quality beyond just commenting about it on HP threads which no one cares about anyway and, 2.) Because, since HP doesn’t ever take chances, their mistakes are mostly just written off as sloppy but nothing to ever get in a pinch about anymore than you would get in a pinch about a story on the front page of The National Star saying that Elvis is alive and well and living on Venus…except he now has three heads…which brings me back to “sophistication.”

You see, HP just PRETENDS to be sophisticated when they are really not much more than a blog version of that aforementioned check out counter rag.  And like your friendly neighborhood payday loan shop, they use bright colors, whistles and bells, and sensationalism to draw in the most vulnerable.  But the difference is, they allow you to enter their world as a user where you, essentially, become a blogosphere gossiper pretending to be part of something that is pretending to be sophisticated.   When push comes to shove, HP just falls in line behind the mantra of everything else in the U.S:  surface over substance, quantity over quality….and ready to change its respective stances and/or colors at the first sound of ((cha-ching))…and a lot of it.

I’ll admit that when I first started posting on HP a couple of years ago I thought I was surrounded by intellectualism.  I thought, “I’m clearly out of my league.” It may have just been an initial impression on my part but then it did, indeed, seem like people who made comments daily were predominately politically astute, engaging, tolerant of others, and interesting.  Now the predominance seems to be hysteria and knee-jerked silliness and immaturity in response to articles written for what seems to be for the sole purpose of eliciting hysteria, knee-jerked silliness, and immaturity.

I wonder sometimes, what would Hume Skeptic think if he were with us today?  I figure if Hume were with us he would have long since left for greener pastures…or no pastures at all.    He had already curbed his comments and his usage to practically nothing some six months ago before he died (hard to believe it’s been nearly six months already, huh?)   And what comments he posted were usually designated for the wee hours of the morning on the smaller threads.  My hunch with Hume is, he saw in HP, then, what I see now…a place that no longer takes itself seriously as a bastion of progressiveness (actually it never was….it just fooled a bunch of us into thinking it was) catering, instead, to those who don’t make waves, who don’t want to have real discourse, who don’t REALLY want to affect change, and those who don’t REALLY want to be funny and/or cutting edge.  If you were really to take the time to examine the articles, content, and comments on HP (and all it would take to give it a thorough examination is about 30 minutes)….and then step back from it for a moment and try to visualize Hume as one of its users in the here and now, the thought of such a thing seems as surreal as Tom Delay as a dancer on “Dances with the Stars.”

No, what HP wants is to be a grisly accident on the side of the road (the more gore the better) that draws hundreds, if not thousands, of rubber-neckers to stare and stare because they can’t look away.  And in the end those who stare will have had their cheap thrill…but when it’s all over they will still be left with that empty feeling inside.  Sooner or later, some of us who stare finally get tired of doing so, realizing it’s always the same and we stop staring altogether.  We’ve outgrown it…and we just move on.

As one of my hero’s, Hunter S. Thompson wrote (before strategic placement of a bullet to the brain…w/ help from a pistol):

“No more walking, no more swimming, no more fun. Sixty-seven. That’s 17 years past 50, 17 more than I wanted or needed. I’m always grumpy, all the time. No fun for anybody. Relax. This won’t hurt much.”

…relax everyone.  Once you leave HP, and eventually you will…..it won’t hurt much.  In fact, it will feel better not being the pawn of a project that simply has no heart, soul, or vision.