by Patrick Appel
She is blogging through the rest of the week but will be hanging up her six-shooters at the end of it:
The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die...[It] seems to me that the madness is over. There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more. Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it's time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.
I read a lot of bloggers. Over a thousand according to my RSS account. Hilzoy might be my favorite of the bunch. For purely selfish reasons, I hope that the blogging itch will be to much to bear and that she will relapse somewhere down the road.
The Dish wishes her nothing but the very, very best.