Yes, Glenn, It HAS Been A Long Time. Happy Birthday, Instapundit, and Thanks.

I also celebrate with him because, quite frankly, his success has been an inspiration to me and my efforts at BitsBlog over the years since, and has led me to write here at PJ Media.

The name of BitsBlog was because “Bithead” was the nom de plume I was using on many of the web sites at the time, and it was who I was. I even had a van with the license plate reading BitsBox. 

At the time, I was working at a multinational bank which shall remain nameless herein (NDAs being what they are), supporting around 400 desktops and the many servers attached to them. Does anyone remember Netware? How about NT Server? The desktops were all PC-DOS and Windows 3.11, on a token Ring Network, on IBM Model 77s. 486/33’s maxing out on a megabyte of RAM. Pretty standard stuff for banks of the day, but certainly looked on as stone knives and bear skins today. I was there for the Y2K scare, when we ended up replacing the 77’s with somewhat newer P-II equipped units that maxed out at about 2MB or so.

IBM swore the newer models would survive New Year’s Eve 1999. Thankfully, they did. I worked there for a total of ten years, give or take. It was in this environment that BitsBlog was born.

You see, while BitsBlog started on Sept. 12, 2001, a date I’m sure you will recognize the importance of, Glenn had been on the ‘net in one form or another for a fair amount of time before that. So had I, actually, since around February of that year, though the blog itself hadn't been started yet.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Glenn was working with Blogger, and I had been writing long-form op-eds on my own channels, including USENET and the old BBS networks, FIDOnet and GTnet. Also at the time, I was hip-deep in co-sysopping the Free File Farm, which was one of the largest Commodore BBSs in the country, both in terms of capacity and call-in numbers.

Once I had absorbed all of what I had seen the day before, I sat down at my job’s desk in downtown Rochester and wrote what became the very first post at BitsBlog, comprised of my thoughts from watching everything that was going on around the country. I decided that day that I was going to follow in Glenn’s footsteps and jump onto Blogger myself. Not because I wanted to be making it a money-making project, but because I felt I needed an outlet. A lot of the early stuff got lost in the transition from Blogger, unfortunately. I screwed up the setup the first day, though, and the first post didn't get actually posted until the 13th, the next day.

See, that first post was written not with the intent of posting it to a blog (it didn't yet exist), but because writing it was an outlet for what I felt. It was as much a mechanism for sorting out my own thoughts. I never really do have a firm grip on why I want to attack a subject in these spaces. In fact, the writing of a column for me has become more an effort of exploring a subject; the codification of random thoughts. The act of putting those thoughts into words on a screen allows me to think about, and REthink about the subject at hand, as I edit them into something that resembles my thoughts. 

My thoughts on a given subject often do not fully take shape until such time as I’ve rewritten them twice. Often, indeed… usually, the ideas are already there, waiting to be cast into words, but not fully defined until the act of sitting down and typing them out. I have had readers note this to me in private correspondence, saying they can almost see the wheels turning as I write.

At the time, I’d already been compiling columns that few saw, but I kept writing more as an outlet of my thoughts than anything.

I said at the time, on the day following the attacks:

It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive. He later wrote in his private diary,

“I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

As this column is written, it is the second night after the dastardly attacks on the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and the Pentagon. In that amount of time, I have heard, on the news channels, and on the internet, a phase batted about several times, in various refinements, when discussing these attacks: “Like Pearl Harbor”

Don’t start on me about the Yamamoto quote being inaccurate. Back then, I didn’t have the research infrastructure we all do now.

I went on to quote an earlier bit of writing. In that earlier column from the previous February, I wrote of my worry that our influence on the world stage had suffered seriously, under the weight of Bill Clinton’s international bumbling. Well, bumbling isn’t the right word. Bullying is perhaps more accurate, yet still not spot-on. I felt then, and still do, that 9/11 was as much the fault of Bill Clinton as anything.

I said, in that earlier column from February 2001, repeated in BitsBlog's first posting:

From Oslo to Camp David, Clinton has pushed Israel to the bargaining table, and pressured her to give up vital strategic and cultural assets she has no business giving away, if survival is at all on her agenda. Ehud Barak, by his giving into Bill Clinton (who, along with his staff including Jim Carville, did much to put Barak into office), has done little more than demonstrate just how empty the Palestinians’ peace talk really is, and how desperate Clinton was to be seen as a good President, his crimes against his oaths not withstanding. Consider….

At Clinton’s insistence, Barak offered Arafat the keys to the kingdom; just about all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem and even Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. How do the peace loving Palestinians respond? Yasser Arafat turned it all down, and gave us another few nights of headlines, filled with kids in the street throwing stones, and being shot, occasionally. He also sent his armed forces, (You recall, they’re supposed to be policemen?) to fire at the Israelis, apparently hoping for an excuse to tell the rest of the world how Israel is a war-mongering nation.

I was angry that day. I continued:

Of course that should have been a signal to about anyone with a brain that he didn’t give a damn about peace. All he and his followers are interested in is the destruction of Israel. It should have also been a signal that Clinton’s attempt at a legacy backfired, big time, and more, that it didn’t have a chance to start with…. something that Clinton should have known, did he have any understanding of the situation at all. You will recall, perhaps that back in 1992, Clinton more or less bragged he had no understanding of matters of foreign policy. This was never quite so clear as during this monstrosity Mr. Clinton unleashed on the world.

You can see some of the analytical thought that has so much become what I do here at PJ Media, here.

For Israel’s part, all of this has been laid at the feet of Ehud Barak, perhaps unfairly. No, I don’t think he was the man for the job, and clearly was only in the PM’s position because Clinton’s people worked so hard to get him there, apparently hoping to set up Clinton’s brokering a of peace deal. Easy to do when you have the PM of Israel owing you his election. But Barak apparently was under pressures he had no control of, having nothing to do with politics at home, or the Palestinians… both of which were quite out of his control to begin with, in any event.. He was concerned with Israel continuing to get support from the US. In this concern, he saw Israel as being on the controlled end of the puppet’s string… and knowing that if he did not capitulate to Clinton’s demands, that vital US support would wither as quickly as Benjamin Netenyau’s prime ministership did, when it became clear he wasn’t going to buckle to Clinton’s concession demands.

And Barak wasn’t alone, nor was the left in Israel, in this perception of US control versus Israel’s survival. Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a liberal even by American standards and certainly not under Bill Clinton’s extortion based control to the extent that Barak was, saw the same problems. His longtime friends, according reports I’ve seen, us he was deeply troubled over the prospect of losing US support… and therefore bought into the ‘land for peace’ deals being brokered by the liberals in the US. This was something I predicted he wouldn’t have done.

I added:

    Israeli voters, seeing this happening, and clearly annoyed with the US control over Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, trounced Barak in the polls. Unless one considers this anger, the election of Ariel Sharon, his replacement, is hard to fathom, since he has never been overly popular, as best I can tell. But perhaps the people of Israel are finally figuring out what the real story is.. that in truth, there is no dealing with the Palestinians, and Arifat.

 One hopes that they’ve not been too late in coming to this conclusion. If they are, world war seems fairly certain to me… possibly nuclear in nature.

 Others learned the lessons, painful as they tended to be. Chaimberlin’s England, for example,along with the remainder of the free world, learned about appeasement of a mortal enemy the hard way. The American left, apparently not having leaned the lesson taught by the infamous socialist, Hitler, was taught the lesson again, by another band of socialists, as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan 40 or so years later.

I was convinced at the time that 9/11 was the price for Bill Clinton’s presidency. Remember the perspective:

Clinton was giving the Palestinians exactly what they wanted, following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Legitimacy, to use as a tool against us. Ironic; he’s supposed to be representing US. And to boot, Clinton was ripping Israel apart for the Israelis. Even before 9/11, I had written several times that Clinton’s sole purpose here was to save his legacy. But how to achieve his goal? By bowing to Islamic terrorists and bullying Israel into giving in. So while that was going on, everything was sweetness and light. America decided to elect George W Bush, who will (rightly) support Israel, and guess who wasn’t happy? And since Clinton had also decimated our military, the ability to mount a credible defense was so laughable as to encourage attack.

Result?

Boom. (New York City tower one.)

Boom. (New York City Tower two.)

Boom. (The Pentagon.)

And splat. (Shanksville Pa.)

So the combo of the 9/11 attacks and Glenn’s efforts, along with places such as The Captain’s Quarters, Q&O, OTB, and many more whose names escape me at the moment, prompted me to start BitsBlog as an outlet for what I was writing and feeling at the time. It's true that I became an advocate for my own  opinions on that day. I owe Glenn a debt for this, because without his efforts, I never would have taken up my keyboard and started doing longer-form opinion pieces, which I truly enjoy writing.

Speaking of owing a debt, I am also profoundly in debt to Art Smith, who from the time I moved off of Blogger, has supported BitsBlog by means of his own ISP and his involvement with WordPress. That’s well over a decade now. Yes, it's still there, with some fewer postings daily. Art and I go over 50 years back. 

About 15 years ago, I basically gave up on trying to make BitsBlog the commercial success that Glenn made Instapundit, though I still used it as my personal soapbox. While the counts I drew were much smaller than Instapundit's huge readership, I kept at it as a personal project. 

In 2019, I started writing for  PJ Media. And while I dropped out because of new job commitments, once I retired, I jumped back in here at PJ Media, and that's a move I'm very glad of. 

In a way, my success here at PJ Media, the success of this column, is also due to Glenn and Instapundit, since links to my writings here are often linked at that still wildly popular site that Glenn started so long ago.

So we celebrate with you, Glenn. I’ll bet you never knew you were at least partially responsible for starting me on this journey. I’m quite sure I’m not alone in this.