Commenter's Remorse

Have you ever left a comment on a blog, and right away kind of wished you hadn't? I'm feeling that way now... just a little bit.

First, some background. A known skimmer officer with the nom de blog "Yankee Sailor" decided to take some potshots at my fellow sub-blogger Rob. (Rob, as you may know, if both active duty and liberal... a strange mix, I admit, but there are more of them than you might think.) Yankee Sailor decided that he didn't think that a liberal on active duty should be allowed the same free speech rights as conservative mil-bloggers, or some such thing, and he came up with some UCMJ articles to "prove" it. Rob responded quite ably on his blog, as well as at Yankee Sailor's place and over at Castle Argghhh!!!, where the discussion really took off. (Some of us sub-bloggers contributed to the discussions, but my "That's what you are, but what am I" comments weren't even in the same league as Rob's well-thought-out dissertations.)

This morning, Yankee Sailor retracted his two posts from yesterday, and replaced them with another post that says he talked to a JAG about the whole issue. Rob commented at Argghhh!!! that someone had called the SubPac JAGs office to complain about his blog, which I thought was a really chickens**t thing to do (calling the office to complain, not posting about someone doing it.) Based on no real data other than the fact that Yankee Sailor is a skimmer, and they do things like that, I got it in my head that Y.S. had been the one to call the CSP lawyer.

The more I thought about that, the more ticked off I got. Paraphrasing Boon and Otter from "Animal House", I thought, "They can't do that to our liberal... only we can give crap to our liberal." Being in that frame of mind, I went over to Yankee Sailor's and posted a comment that was really a little bit over the line -- by way of explanation, I was "responding" to a lame comment to this post by a retired ISC who goes by "Seaspook", but it was aimed squarely at Yankee Sailor:

"Well, Seaspook, I'm retired too, so I don't mind saying that it could appear to some as though you and the commenters on your blog sound like racists with regard to Mexican-Americans. I notice that Yankee Sailor permalinks you... does that mean he supports what some might call your supremacist organization? Would he support someone calling the JAG office in Newport with a complaint that he may be espousing supremacist causes in violation of DoD Directive 1325.6, paragraph 3.5.8? I'd say he's not really guilty of this, but would he support taking up a JAGs time (a government resource) to ask them about it to make sure? Actually, he shouldn't worry about it, because I can't imagine that anyone would stoop low enough to call a JAG office to report a blogger... Anyone who would was probably one of those "Teacher, Teacher, you forgot to give us homework" types in school."

I felt bad about posting almost as soon as I hit "publish", because Rob, and the posters at Castle Argghhh!!!, have tried to keep the debate civilized. While Seaspook and his commenters might actually be racist, I really hate throwing that tag around unless it's obvious, but I needed it to make my point. Plus, there's a chance that Yankee Sailor wasn't the one who called the JAGs office, or the CSP JAG staff just reads blogs on their own. Still, if it turns out that he was the one who called, it was totally worth it...

Update 0044 30 March: Yankee Sailor says he wasn't the one who called the JAG, so it was someone else. I apologized to Seaspook for specifically implying that he and his commenters might be racist, where I should have spoken in generalities, and he graciously accepted my apology. Elsewhere, Chapomatic weighs in with some thoughful ideas on the whole matter.