[first lines]
Willard: [voiceover] RECENT STORIES... shit; I'm still only in Recent Stories... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the Wreck List
Willard: When I was home after my first primary comment thread, it was worse.
[grabs at flying insect]
Willard: I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be at DKos; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the Wreck List. I'm here a week now...waiting for a diary...getting softer. Every minute I stay on this draft page, I get weaker, and every minute Jeff Weaver squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the blogs moved in a little tighter.
Willard: Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted Meta, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.
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Willard: [voiceover] I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of flags up a 1,000 comment diary that snaked through the Wreck List like a main circuit cable and plugged straight into Kos. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Markos E. Moulitsas’ memory, any more than being back in Recent Stories was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.
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Willard: [voiceover] How many people had I already bojo’d? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last comment in my face. But this time it was an Kossack and an officer. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit...charging a man with flag abuse in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the Meta. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn't know what I'd do when I found him.
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Willard: [voiceover] Someday this Primary’s gonna end. That would be just fine with the boys in the comments. They weren't looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I've been back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore. If that's how Kilgore fought the Primary, I began to wonder what they really had against Kos. It wasn't just GBCWs and personal attacks. There was enough of that to go around for everyone.
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Willard: [voiceover] Never get on the Wreck List. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way. Kos got on the Wreck List. He split from the whole fucking program. How did that happen? What did he see here that first primary fight? 44 fucking years old. If he joined the Media, there was no way you'd ever get above Pundit. Kos knew what he was giving up. The more I read and began to understand, the more I admired him. His family and friends couldn't understand it, and they couldn't talk him out of it. He had to apply three times and he had to put up with a ton of shit, but when he threatened to resign, The Hill gave it to him. The next youngest blogger in his class was half his age. They must have thought he was some far-out old man humping it over that opinion page. I did it when I was 19 and it damn near wasted me. A tough motherfucker. He finished. He could have gone for MSNBC host, but he went for himself instead.
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Kos: I've seen blogging...blogging that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a baiter. You have a right to leave my site. You have a right to do that...but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what blogging means. Blogging. Blogging has a face...And you must make a friend of blogging. Blogging and trolling are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
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Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Piefight, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that.
[kneels]
Kilgore: I love the smell of piefights in the morning. You know, one time we had a piefight, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' Rox/Sux body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like……
[sniffing, pondering]
Kilgore: ….victory. Someday this Primary's gonna end...
[suddenly walks off]
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Kos is logging out, his final words:
KOS
"The horror. The horror..."
(with my deepest, most sincere apologies to Francis Ford Coppola)