Something strange in Staunton's water supply?

In the Daily Progress veteran political writer Bob Gibson zeroes in on the role that Rep. Virgil Goode’s now infamous anti-Muslim letter is playing in Virginia’s real world of politics, and in a somewhat distorted reflection of that world -- Virginia’s teaming blogosphere.

“...Goode’s unapologetic comments about cutting off immigration from the Middle East and warning against more Muslims in the Congress capture a spirit of anti-immigrant fervor generally popular among rank-and-file Republicans. More moderate Republicans from U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Alexandria, to Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, R-Fairfax County, don’t speak for that large segment of the GOP faithful. Goode is carrying the ball for a lot of people in the economically distressed southern half of his sprawling rural district.”

Then Gibson turns his sights on a parallel brouhaha that has splattered from one edge of the blogosphere to the other over the holidays:

“...Waldo Jaquith, a prolific Charlottesville blogger on the left side of the political spectrum, drew the line at a few graphic images one of the pro-Goode, anti-Muslim bloggers posted depicting the beheading of an American in Iraq by Islamic terrorists. He removed the offending images and the blogger from his well-read political blog aggregator. Jaquith runs one of the few aggregators that shows every blog entry on about 170 Virginia political blogs - left, right, center or out there -- offering a political commons for discussion and well-rounded reading.

“Formerly known as the Virginia Political Blogs, Jaquith’s commons now appears as Waldo’s Virginia Political Blogroll, born last week after a 132-part discussion about his decision to delist the blogger who thought photos of a beheaded American added heft to his point of view.

“A few right-wing blogs named after donkeys and dogs have taken themselves out of the commons, or have been tossed out, presumably to go where grass is greener and debate is leaner, or more one-sided.”

Click here to read the entire Gibson piece.

It seems the Boycott Waldo movement was mostly centered in the Staunton area. I don’t know how many different people it really involved, but I'm left to wonder why Republicans in that part of Virginia seem so different than others?

Or, could there be a hidden reason beyond clashing brands of conservatism for a clique of rightwing bloggers to have turned on Jaquith, then their fellow Republican bloggers in the ODBA. What would make them do that?

Well, I don’t know what sort of plots may have been really been behind this situation. But maybe there’s a bizarre reason for all this bizarre behavior, a reason no one has thought of.

Maybe it’s even something as off-the-wall as this: There’s a Werner Herzog film called “Heart of Glass” (1976) that is supposedly drawn from a true story in which a whole village in Eastern Europe wigged out because a natural hallucinogen was contaminating the water supply. It put the entire population in a zombie-like trance. Sounds a little like some parties I almost remember in the 1970s, but I digress...

It’s said that director Herzog actually hypnotized the actors in order to get them to perform as strangely as they do in this movie.

So, maybe something weird has gotten into the water out there in the part of Virginia where Interstate 64 intersects with Interstate 81?

And, if some nefarious somebody did slip a mickey into the public water supply for those bloggers that Gibson mentioned -- named after donkeys and dogs -- who in hell would do such a thing?

Lefty bloggers? Communists, or maybe Muslims?