when the status quo frustrates.

Take a seat at the whiskey bar

Nobody serves up commentary on the escalating Israeli/Lebanese crisis as clearly as billmon. I suppose on a middling-small blog like ours, I can expect most people to have read the work of such a titan by the time they get to us, but in the event you haven’t, all 3 of the posts written today are remarkably insightful.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Punkass!, Asides, Big Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Take a seat at the whiskey bar”

  1. JackGoff says:
    July 26, 2006 at 6:56 pm

    After reading that, I think I will take a seat at the whiskey bar…in my apartment…as I drink myself into a stupor.

  2. Quin says:
    January 9, 2007 at 10:15 am

    Well, it looks like the Whiskey Bar has run dry. (Yes, that link’s not supposed to work.)

    I seem to recall a post here by R Mildred taking Billmon to task on his unfortunate foray into blackface imagery a couple of months back. Can’t find it, alas. Others have made the case very well, if anybody happened to miss the brouhaha. Billmon himself only exacerbated things by giving a somewhat unconvincing apology.

    Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him. There was something about his analysis which floored me. From the day I first discovered him, the Whiskey Bar was at the very top of my blogroll. Personally speaking, no other blog has given me as much insight as Billmon’s.

    He always seemed a little bit thin-skinned. I doubt it was any coincidence that his blogging effectively ended two weeks after his blackface incident blew up in his face. (He came back a month later for a mere three days with a quick retrospective of what he considered his most prophetic posts; then he ran a Merry Melodies “That’s All Folks” banner for 24 hours; then he pulled the plug on the site altogether.)

    I suppose it remains to be seen whether Billmon’s gone for good– I know he’s gone on hiatus in the past– but he was top of the list on Digby’s recent blogger memorial post.

    If anybody else out there found as much value in his work as I did, you can visit Miguel de Icaza’s blog to download a zipped archive of the entire Whiskey Bar.

    Under 27MB– what a bargain! It’s here:

    http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jan-06-1.html

  3. Quin says:
    January 9, 2007 at 11:14 am

    Interesting. I’ve just been going through the Whiskey Blog archive myself, and it’s far from complete. (Only 705 out of 2970 posts, but they do span the site’s entire history.) I’m pretty sure this is because by the time de Icaza made the backup, Billmon was already mostly done with the process of weeding out the stuff he didn’t want to save for himself.

  4. Big Gav says:
    January 10, 2007 at 3:17 am

    The Wayback machine / Internet Archive has everything up to May 2006, which should be most of it…

    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://billmon.org

  5. Quin says:
    January 10, 2007 at 10:28 am

    Thanks, Big Gav. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to go reading them all. But it’s good to know they’re there. It’d be a shame for work as good as Billmon’s to be consigned to the electronic shredder in the sky.

    And by the way, thanks also for your own excellent tribute to the guy.

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