Starting a blog as a politician is not always easy, and Tom DeLay has proved just that. When DeLay recently turned his old campaign address into a blog and made his first post on Sunday, it only took liberal bloggers an hour to turn down the site.
Micah L Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum had this to say about the incidence:
Unfortunately for DeLay, among the first people to notice his outpost in the two-way land of citizen give-and-take, where people speak truth to power, were leading liberal sites like ThinkProgress and Crooks and Liars. In a little over an hour, TomDeLay.com was flooded with comments, nearly all of them negative, many of them flagrantly obscene (and some of them quite funny, like the person who said "everyone already assumes bloggers are unemployed losers...thanks for reinforcing that stereotype").
Since then, DeLay's first post has been taken down, along with 100+ comments. And comments have been disabled on his site. But if you want to read the entrails, you can go to TomDeLaydotcom.blogspot.com, where they have been preserved by a resourceful netizen.
What was DeLay thinking? That people wouldn't talk back?
The DeLay blog was turned back on early Monday morning. The original comments seem to have been removed. It might be a good idea to plan the release of the blog properly.
Update:
More DeLay-stories on Tailrank
The Hill on DeLays new blog career
DeLay enters the Blogosphere,The Galveston Daily News