So I get pinged Tuesday by the new Loudoun Times-Mirror reporter, who wants to know if I have any comment on the Delgaudio fundraising letter that embarrassed both the Weekly Standard (“This is obviously not the sort of advertising that we would accept, nor will we accept it in the future.”) and the Washington Times-associated Packard Media Group (“The ad that was sent today did not go through the company’s normal vetting process for prospective ads. If it had, it would not have passed the company’s standards and would not have been sent.”).
Sure I did, and sure enough a little while later the article was published and started generating comments. The thread took the usual trajectory that these threads do, with a few more anonymous crazies (sorry, but what else can you call the kind of people who would treat these letters as legitimate?) coming out of the woodwork as the world turned and as their leaders called them forth, but there weren’t very many of them and they were being handled in a reasonable way by other commenters. I didn’t see anything I felt compelled to report as a Terms of Service violation.
So imagine my surprise to find this morning that all 100+ comments had been removed, and commenting closed.
What happened? According to the LTM (h/t Loudoun Insider), “the comments were getting too vulgar and they didn’t have the time to go through each and every comment.” The comments have been reposted at Too Conservative (no, things published on the internet never really go away), so you can be the judge. I thought that there was an opportunity to do some education on basic things like what pedophilia is, personally; although I agree that some of the comments could be classified as vulgar, the issue was mainly ignorance.
And although the headline is either hilariously inappropriate or intended as sly ridicule (“Delgaudio: ‘Human Rights Campaign can’t silence me'”), the article itself is very good. It’s short and balanced, but still adeptly exposes the histrionic crybaby that is Eugene Delgaudio. The comments aren’t needed for that to come across loud and clear.
Did Delgaudio have a tantrum about being exposed further in the comments? Maybe. It’s always reasonable to question the motivations of a local paper that inexplicably endorsed this lying charlatan, dismissing his moral crimes as “antics.” It’s not as if they could possibly not know what he is. As is the case with the Loudoun Hounds, there is a great deal of money involved, and that – unfortunately for Loudoun – clouds moral judgment.
I got a call from the Times-Mirror about the removal and closing of all comments. As I said here, I wondered if there had been more comments after I made my final one and logged off around 7:30 Wednesday night, since I hadn’t seen anything that would warrant that extreme action. The LTM person shared that there were 7 or 8 more after me, and that they were increasingly vulgar and homophobic. In their experience, once a thread starts in that direction, it doesn’t stop. Nobody wanted to stay up all night deleting vulgar comments, so they shut the whole thing down. I can’t really blame them for that. It does provide a kind of instruction manual for Delgaudio’s “employees” to consult whenever they want to shut down a public comment thread, though.
I know it’s an imperfect solution, but my preference would be to block the IP address of repeat offenders.
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