Taking His Internet And Going Home

Tbogg walks away from a venue where he's long provided perspective along with belly laughs. Before going, he left a pick of greatest hits.

He's been a master at saying what needs to be said, and with admirable wit and brevity. Though one of my favorite bits of Tbogg's writing was in a longer than usual piece last year, in which he cut the Republicans and their "job creators" spiel down to size.

When I was a kid, my dad and his brothers had a dry cleaning business and, back in those days, they actually used to deliver dry cleaning to their customers homes. ... My dad, being the youngest, used to make most of the deliveries ... and he used to tell us how, when he went to deliver dry cleaning to the swells up the hill in La Jolla, often people would leave a note on the door or the gate asking him to leave their clothes because they wouldn’t be home. In those days most people would pay upon delivery, so my dad would knock on the door or ring the house anyway in an attempt to get paid which, at the time, was probably a couple of bucks tops back in those golden days when dimes and nickels weren’t just useless pocket weight. After getting no answer, my dad would leave the clothes to avoid a call to the shop wondering why they hadn’t been delivered which could only mean yet another trip back up the hill. More than a few times, after getting back in the truck, he would look back at the house only to see the curtains move because the occupants were checking to see if he had gone and whether it was safe to come out and collect their belongings.

All of this, of course, to get out of paying a $1.50 for services rendered which, by the way, the customer would invariably dispute the next time they dropped their clothes off if they weren't outright trying get out of paying because of too much starch or maybe a missing button.

He used to tell us all about it over dinner.

But what my dad didn't tell us was that those rich people who lived in those nice houses were the real hard workers in the world (unlike himself and his brothers) and if we worked as hard as those wealthy folks we could be just like them and live in a nice house, and not a $35 a month apartment, and we could drive a big car that we actually owned and maybe even someday have a color TV. Because, even at a very young age and before we had the appropriate words to describe them, he didn’t need to tell us what we instinctively knew about these people and how they got where they were.

They were assholes.

The kind of assholes who would try to screw some guy out of a couple of bucks because he was just a common working man with a family and he didn't make his money the old fashioned way.

By inheriting it.

So Reince Preibus and Marco Rubio can take their remarkably similar Dreams My Father Sold Me stories and blow it out their asses. That starry-eyed pie in the sky bullshit doesn't sell any better now than it did back then. Save it for the rubes at the Americans For Prosperity and Freedomworks rallies.

Those dumbasses will believe anything for the price of a balloon...

"See you in the Norton Anthology," says Roy Edroso—

... Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist... who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ... but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand...

Perfect sentiments, as are those of commenters—

JennOfArk
Well, George Tierney Jr. of Greenville, SC, for one is not sorry to see TBogg go.

StringOnAStick
... I'll miss the blog, but my sadness is well tempered by support for his reasons for hanging it up. Life is indeed too short. I hope he isn't done with writing; he's too damned good and I would be immeasurably sad if I let myself think I'll never see another perfect Tboggism.

hellslittlestangel
Well, he says he'll be on Twitter. If that isn't giving up writing, I don't know what is.