This was originally posted as an open thread on BFM. I’ve tweaked it a bit to bring it here to cbdc.

Oh, you kids know how I love me some Mike Bishop. Sometimes I blog about him, sometimes I doodle -

- sometimes we bring in some outsiders to expose his alter-ego. (Muwahaha!!) But do you all remember why I started loving him? Let me take you back.

2007, summertime. We had just opened the doors on BFM Soap. Wizardkitten was beating on the Senate Republicans, Mark Schauer was trying to get some things done in the Do-Nothing Senate, and I was off doing my own thing. Suddenly the Michigan State Senate was no longer allowed to access to BFM and the next thing you know, Mike Bishop goes down in history as the only elected Michigan official to ‘censor’ a blog.

And that’s when Mike Bishop got my attention.

Now some of you may remember that this little ditty was re-worked and run as an opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press? Well you all know what a cesspool the Detroit Free Press online can be. And what do you have in a cesspool?

Big flaming piles of poo.

One of these big flaming piles of poo, who I shall call “Darth Poo” found me on the Free Press and decided to start posting here. (Not sure if you can see his comments; he was troll-rated before being banned) I wasn’t a part of this discussion because I was working down in Warren that day, and I had a wicked cold/flu thing. I told the Warren peeps to call me if they had a problem, and I took off early. By 3pm I was sleeping merrily in my bed, never having even looked at this thread.

Meanwhile, Darth Poo thought that I, Christine, was every single one of those people in that comment thread.

Really, he did.

I’m sleeping. My phone rang. I answered it, thinking it was someone at Warren who needed help.

Stupid. Stupid.

For the next few minutes, Darth Poo gave me a bunch of crap about France and Syria and BFM. (Keep in mind I just woke up.) And then he went on about Ann Coulter and how we liberals are pathetic for hating her. (I just woke up) And then he went on about how he could take down BFM any time he wanted if I didn’t let him back on the site. (Just woke up … shuffling my way to the computer now … can’t even see yet.) And how he knew my home address and my phone number … ( Email from Wizardkitten, “just banned some guy name Darth Poo, he’s nuts!”)

(AWAKE NOW)

Oh crap.

I managed to get him off the phone with some civility, and I thought that was the end of it. Until I saw what he was saying about me & BFM over on the Free Press forums. That was a mess that we had to clean up, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

Darth Poo had one of those right wing nutbag forums where they talk about the goodness of Bush/God and the badness of Nancy Pelosi/France. He posted my name, address, and phone number with instructions to “feel free to drive this bitch crazy.” Few days later, he posted the same info on a “people to be shot on sight” list, right under Nancy Pelosi and Cindy Sheehan.

Ok. So I went to the state police post on M-21 in Flint, right there by Linden Road, but the cop there couldn’t even be bothered to put down his coffee cup while he told me to go away. “You’re a victim where you live, and you don’t live in Flint.” (ssslurp) “You’ll have to go find someone where you live.”

I didn’t know how to explain that I’ve pretty much offended everyone in the place where I live, so I can’t imagine them helping me. The Corunna MSP Detective? He’s featured in a post with a picture of Officer Barbrady. The Sheriff’s Dept? Yeah, I had gone after the Sheriff too. Kinda.

See, rumor at the time was that there was something creepy going on at the SCSD. I tried to figure it out, but I just got shot down. No one wanted to talk to me, and I’m pretty sure they knew what I was after. Not sure who the Sheriff’s friends were, or even if they cared about what a blogger does. But if they did care, they probably didn’t like me.

Ok back to the story. So I’m driving back to Shiawassee from the Flint cop shop, slow as I can go without getting a ticket for going too slow. (Clinton Twp will write you for anything) (Really, it’s true) And right about now I hate myself.

I called a friend. (Yes, while driving. Don’t judge me.) “You have friends at the Sheriff’s Dept. Give me a name, I’m telling him you sent me. Help me.” And she told me to go see Detective XYZ. So I went straight to the Sheriff’s Department and said, “I am here to see Detective XYZ and Mr. and Mrs. ABC sent me.”

And a few minutes later, Detective XYZ invited me to his office, and we talked. Since he didn’t know much about computers/Internet/Ethernet/whatever, he invited Detective WWW in to talk to me. (Detective WWW knows a little something about the web, as you might deduce from his name)

Detective WWW sat down and took a look at the evidence I brought. And then he said, “I read your blog.”

Oh crap. I hate myself anew.

Silence. Long time.

Finally, I force out, “I was trying to help you guys.”

I hate me so hard.

Well to make a short story long, the good detectives helped me, the shoot-on-sight list came down, and I never heard from Darth Poo again.

Now one thing that you have to understand is that up until this point, I hated the police. I had no faith in them whatsoever, and I directed a lot of angry blogging their way back in my early blogging years. I was less angry by this point, but I still had no faith in them. So when they helped me, it was huge. I can’t explain it, but the world changed for me on that day. And that was when I decided that I would get to the bottom of that Sheriff thing.

I’ll tell you about that in my next post.