The Lion and Gun

As we prepare to break the traditional bottle of champagne against the prow of the good ship Lion and Gun – a cheap bottle because, hell, it's only a blog and we aren’t made of money – we are acutely aware that many political weblogs, like many politicians, make promises that they never intend to keep. We at TLaG are determined to treat you with more respect than that; and yet we, too, excel at promise-not-keepingness. So we will not promise you anything except what we won’t do:

• We will not forget that what is true is more important than what we can convince you is true.
• We will not lie to or mislead you for political purposes. (We might do so, however, for our own amusement.)
• We will not address you with smugly self-satisfied, hectoring, holier-than-though, and morally superior language; we will reserve such treatment for the hundreds of political hacks and talking heads who actually deserve it.
• We will not entitle any post 'Deep Thought' because when Saturday Night Live stops doing something because it's too lame you know it's gotta be really lame.
• We will not indulge in incessant navel-gazing about how important blogs are as a corrective to mainstream media, partisan politics, an over-powerful Executive, a do-nothing Congress, global warming, economic crises, foreign conflicts, and the brutal inevitability of death in a coldly uncaring world. Unless we're being cheekily post-modern.
• We will not use the word ‘post-modern’ again.
• Ditto ‘meta’.
• And ‘meme’.
• We will probably not keep the previous promise. We apologize in advance.
• Above all, we will never cease to ask questions.

Sometimes – not often – we might even take a stab at answers.

Photo provided under a Creative Commons license by Joshua Sosrosaputro