So.

I was reading Jim Geraghty’s “Morning Ace Quotes” column today and it occurred to me: a multitude of disparate voices aren’t really necessary any longer in a failed erstwhile constitutional republic like ours, especially so long as we have properly networked realists pointing out, to each other and in an endless feedback loop of links and retweets, should their barometers tell them the time is ripe, how, eg., the media is unfair to conservatives and has a double standard when it comes to probing wedge issues (unless, of course, the conservative in question happens to be some dumb snowbilly embarrassment; or maybe a former witch apprentice; or some businessman or doctor with no “practical” experience to run the government — and therefore, an unserious player whose very intrusion into big boy politics is just so much distraction: those presumptuous fuckers get the beatings they deserve, and the pragmatists who join the left in excoriating them are merely doing some pruning, for our own electoral good!).

I mean, the right-side blogosphere has done the “liberal hypocrisy” thing for over a dozen years now, and it seems to be what sells, particularly among the insular crowd who has taken an Army of Davids and “managed it” into a more elite fighting force of its own conceit. We, as a movement, are the scribblers of finger-in-the-wind jeremiads — of endlessly changing philosophical stances designed to fit the mood of the current political climate.

That kind of atmosphere is completely alien to me, and I can no longer breathe in it.

I thank you all for your support over the years — those few of you who are left — but my time on the stage, such as it was and has been, is through.

Party politics as team sport is not something I’m interested in playing. I’ll leave that to the fake wonks and the wannabe amateur pollsters. The political blogosphere is not the place of academic or even philosophical ideas, nor is it any longer conducive to unearthing, examining, and revealing the kinds of kernel assumptions that create the very conditions we conservatives (a label whose meaning has been watered so thin that Oliver Twist would need several helpings just to fill his stomach) constantly bitch about.

Instead, it’s all about the bitching — though the more “nuanced” writers on “our” side will often take a different tack and try to appear more equanimous, a stance they believe sets them apart from the typical shrieking wingnuttery that so embarrasses them and evinces a kind of “thoughtful” waffling that in actuality is intellectual cowardice masquerading as sober deference.

Since I started writing daily, I’ve watched a once robust blogosphere become a cheerleading competition, a pair of competing mean girls tables, and the backstabbing and cliquishness of the thing has so thoroughly soured me on it all that most days I don’t know why I bother.

And if I can’t figure out any longer why I bother, it seems to me best not to.

It’s really no secret what’s happened to protein wisdom — a “has been” site that certain people worked very hard to leave in that condition. People I once championed and defended. People I worked with on occasion. People whom I’ve visited and who have visited me.

Frankly, it’s time for me to tell them all to go to hell. And I can do that with impunity, because they don’t much care what I have to say, my reach having been effectively stymied.

As this month’s fundraiser peters to a close, with the marketplace telling me my insights aren’t especially valuable, it seems like a good time for me to bow off the stage. Unless and until I can re-invent myself as something other than the shunned pseudo academic pyschosexually and violent predatory destroyer of the noble and virtuous — which ain’t gonna happen.

I mean, I gotta be me, right?

And staying true to that means I surrender the field to the positioners, the poseurs, the “pragmatists,” the “realists,” the “serious” and “sober” and “nuanced” thinkers on our side who have, since the initial boom of the political blogosphere, given us a supermajority Democrat Congress, the disastrous end to the Bush years, McCain and Romney presidential runs, and a spirited defense of every justification why it’s good and righteous to savage activist conservatives, particularly those running for office, who make any kind of gaffe that can be “used against us” by a media that will always find a way to create the soundbite they need, context be damned.

In short? Gggghah. Last bridges burned. With no regrets.

[…Aaaaaaaannnnd exeunt]