Happy Birthday, Dear Kitty!My
very favorite person in the entire blogosphere, celebrates another revolution around the sun.
Kitty has been amazingly supportive of my blogging efforts. I first became aware of her blog in April 2004 through the efforts of the mothership,
Lucianne.com. I was blogging over at Kerry Haters at the time and noticed that Lucianne had linked to her blog as the blogtruth of the day. Suffering a little pang of jealousy, I whined a bit about never getting the big link myself, and Kitty put up a
prominent link on her blog suggesting that all the Lucianne readers should go over and check it out (although I do have to wonder--who's Gary O?). It resulted in the first day I'd ever had 100 visitors.
Kitty kept feeding me traffic and stories to the point that I suggested that she join forces as a co-blogger on Kerry Haters. The rest, as they say, is history. It was
Kitty who first noticed a little sidebar to an article which mentioned Kerry's 1968 Christmas in Cambodia adventure, and pointed it out on the blog. I thought the story sounded just a little too convenient, and when our reader L. Larsen pointed out an obvious problem with the story (that Nixon had not been in power in 1968), I resolved to
check it out a little further. When I checked with Douglas Brinkley's biography of Kerry, Tour of Duty, I was startled to find that there was no mention of a Christmas 1968 incursion into Cambodia.
The story didn't cause much of a sensation at the time, but on August 5, 2004, a chapter from John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi's book, Unfit for Command, was released which highlighted the Christmas in Cambodia lie. I briefly noted that we'd covered the story a few months earlier. As it happened I had met Hugh Hewitt a few days earlier at a book-signing, so I guess he was checking my blog for reactions to the O'Neill book. He followed the link to the May post.
That afternoon, I happened to be listening to his program and was flabbergasted to hear him mention at least five times that the story had first been covered by a website called Kerryhaters.blogspot.com. We were already becoming a fairly good-sized blog, with over 800 visitors a day by then. Within the month, propelled by Hugh's crediting us, we were at 2500 visitors a day. Heady times indeed!
Without Kitty I would not have spotted that Christmas in Cambodia story. Without L. Larson pointing out the inconsistency of the Nixon claim, I might never have followed up on it. Without my meeting Hugh Hewitt we might never have gotten credit for it. Without the credit we might never have gotten the big jump in visitors that resulted. So when Third Wave Dave says
Kitty made a difference, he ain't just whistling Dixie!
At any rate, I am deeply grateful to Kitty for all the assistance she's provided me in blogging, and for being a friend. Here's to Kitty!
