Thanks for coming out tonight, folks. I hope you've all had a good time.
This last song goes out to some rather ornery fellas — the Internet trolls who've come here to BernardGoldberg.com over the years to share their deeply rooted animosity with the rest of us in our website comment section.
Now, I'm not talking about those regular commenters who show up for honest debate and to maybe fling a few barbs. I'm talking about those special few who manage to crawl down even lower than our already charitable standards for community discourse.
Readers who've been coming here for while know that it's pretty darned hard to get yourself banned from this website. We let a fair amount of unsavory rhetoric fly for the sake of passionate and sometimes politically incorrect discussions. But we do have our limits. And as a site moderator, I've had to send a few folks on their way.
Sadly, some of these individuals didn't go quietly. In fact, some of them never really went away at all. Stripping them of their capacity to post comments here inexplicably left a hole in their souls that may never heal, as evidenced by their continued online hounding of us writers from beyond the website.
So I figured it was time to put together a little song about this resilient, attention-needing bunch.
I call it, "To All the Trolls I've Banned Before," and it may or may not line up with a memorable 1984 hit from Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias. It goes I little something like this. One. Two. Three. Four...
To all the trolls I've banned before
Who live to wage pointless online war
I'm kinda sorry they came along
Still I dedicate this song
To all the trolls I've banned before
To the numskull who threatened to sue
If we didn't grant him his own column to spew
He demanded space to share his plan
Of labeling Republicans the Ku Klux Klan
Just one troll that I've banned before
The partisan winds are always blowing
Still I manage to find hope
But the rancor keeps on flowing
So I shake my head and just say "nope"
To the conspiracy-nut who would always bristle
And post lots of hate-rants about Bill Kristol
At "neocons" you're clearly angered
But we're not the Weekly Standard
At the wrong website was this hopeless troll I've banned before
To the butthurt guy I booted six years ago
Whose smallness keeps him coming back for mo'
Your tough-guy emails are real winners
I read them to friends at dinners
We all laugh at this troll I've banned before
Your bitter winds are always blowing
Your wife has asked me for my aid:
"Keep ignoring the fits he's still throwing
And his obsession may one day fade"
To the creep who always sought new lows
Like mocking my young son's health woes
We kept you around for way too long
It didn't matter that you were always wrong
So long, tedious troll I've banned before
To all the trolls I've banned before
Who live to wage pointless online war
I'm kinda sorry they came along
Still I dedicate this song
To all the trolls I've banned before
Thank you very much, everyone. You were a great audience. Don't forget to tip your server on the way out.