BARTCOP.COM — an Okie, not from Muskogee

"Poppie Bush, yeah,
the BFEE's been in power
since Hitler, or before,
and they're up to no good.
__________
That's why the stock market crashed.
That's why there are no jobs.
That's why the treasury's empty.
__________
That's why the world trade centers fell,
all because of the Bush bastards
and their greed,
and the idiotic Democrats,
who refused to fight back,
who refused to list the facts."

Bart likes Shirley Manson, too

__________

Chinaco's more of a ceremonial
thing, more like a peace pipe,
you get my drift.

A bottle lasts me, these days,
maybe a month, maybe two.

__________

__________

And they said, no, no,
you're the crazy one.
Rush is God.
He knows everything.

I said, no, no, he's a dork
and he's fat and he's stupid.

__________

THE
New American Dream Interview




BARTCOP is a popular Democratic blogger from Tulsa, Oklahoma, active on the web since 1996 and who has produced his own internet radio show since 2004.

"Bartcop.com" and "Bartcop Radio" consist principally of commentary on the politics, written/spoken in a down-to-earth style from a Democratic perspective, and laced inextricably with humor. Scathing criticism of George W. Bush and other Republicans, and sometimes other Democrats, is omnipresent in Bartcop's "rants".

Although a serious political commentator (i.e., his site is not satire), Bartcop sometimes describes himself as primarily a comedian. The constant witticisms and humor that define his page have gained him a large and loyal readership.

Bartcop is an ardent Bill Clinton loyalist. He supported Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2008, and had been an outspoken opponent of Barack Obama, splitting with the majority of the liberal Blogosphere and causing much controversy from late 2007 up until June 2008, when Sen. Obama secured enough delegates to carry his party's nomination. Since then, Bartcop has thrown his full support behind Sen. Obama.

Bartcop.com was established in February 1996 with the name "Rush Limba, Lying Nazi Whore", a reference to popular conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, intentionally spelling his last name phonetically).

This name remained for many years.

Bartcop.com now is the masthead for several websites. Bartcop has launched a radio show, available to financial supporters of Bartcop.com, and many of the site's readers frequent the #bartcop IRC chat room.




NAD: Bart, hello. Thank you for taking the time.

Where are you from originally.

BARTCOP: I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. I grew up a Catholic. That's part of the reason I'm so twisted.




NAD: How did you get into website publishing? Why?

BARTCOP: Well, as you might know, I've got a smart mouth, always had a smart mouth.

And in 1993 my boss said, "Bart, you ought to try this Internet thing, it's brand-new.

No one even knows about it, but I've got a feeling you'd like it. You can buy a computer for $700.

So, I went and bought a computer, and I thought, look here, you can get the weather in New Delhi! Like anyone gives a fuck what the weather is in New Delhi. I guess it's Mumbai now.

But there wasn't a whole lot to do, there weren't a whole lot of people on line. So I signed up with Prodigy. At that time there was AOL, Prodigy, Microsoft Network.

One of the subjects they had was "Radio," and I clicked on there and found Rush Limbaugh, and I expected everybody talking about what a dork he was. But no, they were saying "Rush is great." "Rush knows everything." "Rush is God."

_______________

And I wrote back, you dudes do know he's kiddin', right?
It's all just a big joke.
He doesn't think that way.
He just found a way to make some money,
by saying the ridiculous.

_______________

And I wrote back, you dudes do know he's kiddin', right? It's all just a big joke. He doesn't think that way. He just found a way to make some money, by saying the ridiculous.

And they said, no, no, you're the crazy one. Rush is God. He knows everything.

I said, no, no, he's a dork and he's fat and he's stupid.

And his fans would write back and say, "Bart, you suck."

And I'd list the ten lies he told that day and instead of either refuting them or saying, you got it wrong and here's why, they wrote back and said, "you suck."

Well, that's not really an answer.

It got to whoever could insult the other the better I felt won the argument.

So, I started saying bad things about those who disagreed with me.

And after awhile it got old, because it was the same old people, so I branched off and started sending out a little newsletter by email.

And as time went by that hit the eyes of Marc Perkel. And he wrote back and said, "Hey, I like your stuff, you ought to put it into a webpage.

I thought, "What's a webpage?"

And he said, "I can do it for you." So each time I sent him an email he put in on a webpage.

And then he wrote back and said, "Hey, why don't you take five minutes and learn HTML and you can post your own stuff and I don't have to bother with it.

And I thought, now, there's a lot of power in a monkey's hand.

Anyway, so that's how I got into website publishing.




NAD: Where did the name Bartcop come from?

BARTCOP: I do not know.

I haven't done an interview for probably five years, but I probably did five or six interviews before that, and every time the question came up I'd give a different answer.

I remember one time saying I bought my house from a cop.

Anyway, I do not know where it came from.

I must have been in a drunken stupor in the '60s. No, in '96, when that happened.




NAD: How many times have you been asked that?

BARTCOP: One-hundred twenty-one.




NAD: Do you and Mrs. Bart really drink Chinaco?

BARTCOP: Well, strangely, not so much.

Mrs. Bart prefers margueritas, maybe a marguerita a month. She's not a hard liquor hound. That's not coming out right, either.

Generally I only drink Chinaco at the start of a show. Sure, now and then there'll be a ballgame, come on, or this or that.

Let me tell you, I had a shot of the good stuff when Obama took the oath. It had some real tequila, if you know what I mean.

Chinaco's more of a ceremonial thing, more like a peace pipe, you get my drift. A bottle lasts me, these days, maybe a month, maybe two.

You don't sit down and just chug it, like I did back in the day.



NAD: Is it Tulsa moonshine?

BARTCOP: No, Chinaco, like all tequila, is made in, I think it is, Jalisco, Mexico. If it's not from Mexico, it ain't tequila. Just like all champagne has to be from France. You can't get champagne from northern California. You can get sparkling something-something, but you can't get champagne, because that's the definition of it. Words mean things, as a Nazi pig once said.




NAD: Would you like to choose one of these to answer and elaborate on?

— Are UFOs real?

Where certainly there are unidentified things in the sky. I've seen them myself. We went to Area 51, I think it was '98, and we saw shit in the sky that was unexplainable, and it was very strange. Hey, that light in the sky that just made a hard-right turn, a right-angle turn. Planes can't do that. I wonder what that was.

There was crazy shit in the sky, but I don't believe in the little green men. If the little green men. If there really were people from other planets, flying from planet to planet, they would be more technologically advanced. They could just land and say, we're taking over.



— Did we land on the moon in 1968?

No, we did not, and anyone says we did is a liar.

And I pity the fool who wants to get into a debate with me did we land on the moon in 1968, because it was 1969.

And, of course we did.



— Did Bush knock down the towers?

We don't know.

All we know about the towers is that Bush lied about what happened that day, and he refused to talk about anything that happened that day without his nanny there, couldn't be under oath, had to turn off all recorders, nobody could take notes.

We know for sure that Bush and Cheney are lying about 9/11. That's all we know for sure.

And the Democrats never challenged them. The Democrats just said, hey, whatever you say happened, happened, and we're fine with that. Thank you, Lee Hamilton.



— Was Paul Wellstone's death an accident?

Aaah, hard to say.

All we know about the Bush administration is that they're lying to us about everything.

Paul Wellstone, it's my understanding that he's the type of guy who might have chained himself to the Capitol doors and says, you're not gonna attack Iraq as long as I'm alive.

And if he did that, he might have started the peace movement early. He might have been the Cindy Sheehan two or three years ahead of time, and he might have prevented that invasion.

And that invasion had to go down because there was too many hundreds of billions of dollars to be stolen. And you try to get in a greedy oilman's way when there's hundreds of billions of dollars to be stolen, and they will kill you. Please. They'll kill you for fifty dollars. You don't think they'll kill you for five hundred billion dollars. Use your damned head.



— Is Bigfoot real?

Well, no, just like the UFOs, if there's something out there, c'mon, as time goes by, surely one of 'em got struck crossing a highway or something.

Matter of fact, two weeks ago, we were in Fouke Monster territory, in lower eastern Arkansas.

Matter of fact, that's where Mena airport is. We were thirty-forty miles from the Mena airport. I was gonna go by and look at it. Just because there's some of you weird people who think Bill Clinton flew in cocaine to Mena airport. No, it was the Bush bastards that did that. The Bush bastards the governor of Arkansas and said the CIA needs to use one of your airports. Would you mind keeping the state police away from it and don't ask a lot of questions.

And the governor of the tiny state of Arkansas said yes to the CIA and yes to the president, I think is what happened. Bill Clinton didn't do anything but honor a request from the White House.



— Is there a God?

Oh, Mike, you kidder, you.

Of course there's no God. The idea that you always do the right thing because in thirty or forty years when you get to the pearly gates you're gonna have to explain it to St. Peter and then Jesus.

No, there is no God, and people who say there is are afraid, no, they're hopin' there is. They would really like for there to be a God.

There gonna find out. No, they're not gonna find out, 'cause when you die, your brain shuts off.

There's not even a chance to say, I told you so.





NAD: A daily webpage. Isn't that a lot of work?

BARTCOP: Yes, it is.

I think one way to look at it is kind of the Robbie Knievel principal, you know, there's not a lot of people putting out a webpage — not that I do every day — but it is a lot of work, and the websites that publish daily, the Huffington Post, Buzzflash, I've got a feeling those are teams of people. Goodness knows the Daily Kos has got a thousand people making him rich.

Yeah, there is a lot of work, not that it's hard work, it just takes so much time.




NAD: You used to sell cars, too, right? Are you able to do just the website now?

BARTCOP: Actually, I never sold cars. I might have sold a car or two, because I was the only one there when somebody went to lunch, but I was the finance man. They would come haggle with the salesman, and they would bring that person to me, and I would turn him down and the owner would say, no, no, no, we need the business, go ahead and buy that.

And that's how the page got started. I ended up with a lot of time on my hands. I was able to go from a couple of hours at night. We used to do a page a week, and when I ended up with a lot of time on my hands, started doing a page a day, and that kicked off the big Bartcop.com.





NAD: You started off in 1996. That's a million years ago in cyber years. You must have been one of the first. How many readers do you think you have?

BARTCOP: Well, there is no telling.

Years ago we had what we thought were about two million readers a month, and then that counter broke. I asked Marc Perkel what happened. He said, that counter won't handle the traffic you're generating. But I could pay a hundred a month for an accurate counter, or at least I could back then. I didn't want to pay a hundred a month for an accurate counter.

So, you just don't know. There's all kind of different ways to measure it.

Nobody knows.

But we know there are dozens of readers.




NAD: Please tell us more about yourself, the things you have done, what you would like to do, what you did today.

BARTCOP: I don't like to talk about myself, 'cause I'm not very important.

The things I have done ... well, I built the webpage ... that's about it.

What I would like to do ... well, in the time I have left, I don't know. Mrs. Bart wants to see Alaska. And it might be kind of fun to run around the country, you know, just jump in the ol' Bartmobile, head west, go to Vegas and then San Diego, then up the coast and then Seattle, and then over there, to Chicago. That'd be kind of a fun thing to do.

What I did today? I woke up. I put sixteen bags of green tea in the little percolator there and ate me a bowl of cereal and started workin' on the page. It's 12:30 now. That's pretty much what my day is, I make some green tea, eat a bowl of cereal. Sometimes I go to the post office, do this and that, go to the store. Basically, I work on the page until Mrs. Bart gets home.

It's funny how rapidly things go by. You wake up you sit down and you start fiddling with the computer and the next thing you know, it's six o'clock, and you've lost 10-12 hours, like on the X-Files.

Basically, it's the green tea that keeps me going. And speaking of, next month is five years since I got the bad news and next month there's a Friday the 13th. So I think I'm going to do a radio show on the 13th, just to celebrate my un-dead ass.




NAD: Have you ever met Shirley Manson? Has she ever written or called?

BARTCOP: No. And I've got something to say about that. I'm going to be so bold to say that she might even be a little rude, not having ever contacted me.

Now, you think, Mr. Self-Important, he thinks yeah, yeah, yeah. But years ago I found out, and it was a great tribute, but it semi pissed me off.

Her guitar player, Steve, the bald one, when you went to his page, and this is so cool, someone sent it to me one day and said, Bart, you're on Steve, the Garbage guitar player's webpage, and I couldn't find anything, and then I scrolled over the word "Yes," and there it said Bartcop.com. And I thought, that's so cool, my name wasn't on there, but it said Bartcop.com.

It must have made some kind of impression on him, and if you read the page you can't help but see her picture. Surely at some point he went up to her and said, hey, there's this liberal nut guy who's got your picture on his page every day, kind of a weird thing.

Not that she owes me anything, but she could write and say, Bart, thanks for the appreciation. If I'm ever in K-Drag I'll come by and see ya, kind of lie that people tell, ya know.

But no, I have not heard from her. No phone call, no email. Nothing. Shame. Shame, shame on the Shirley.




NAD: What's up with your love of the Clintons?

BARTCOP: Well ... I might object to the phrasing.

I think Bill Clinton was the most talented politician I'd ever seen, and I'm a political observer. So, it's like being a football fan and watching Kurt Warner throw the ball. If you're a boxing fan, you might appreciate seeing Ali in his prime.

That's really all it is. Clinton's got his problems, his defects and imperfections, that we all do, but he was the best there was, and I'm sure that as time goes by, somebody will eclipse him. Obama might even.

Obama doesn't have that go for the throat ... you know, in boxing when you get a guy hurt ... you gotta wail on him ... you just gotta go downtown, tear him up, and Obama, he doesn't ... he'd rather get along.

Obama certainly has potential for greatness. I wish him success.




NAD: Do you have hope in Obama?

BARTCOP: Yeah, I do.

His whole thing is getting along, but when you're dealing with fascist dogs, I don't know ... can you be nice to a rattlesnake ... that's the whole thing about the scorpion who hitched a ride on a turtles back, stung him, and said, hey, I'm a scorpion, that's what I do ... dumb ass!

Bein' nice to the Republicans, that might be a fatal mistake. We won't know until it plays out.




NAD: How bad do you dislike George Bush Jr.?

BARTCOP: Well, I don't think we have time for that?



NAD: Do you also dislike Reagan and Bush Sr.?

BARTCOP: Well, Reagan was a dork, and a dupe, and a patsy.

Poppie Bush, yeah, the BFEE's been in power since Hitler, or before, and they're up to no good. That's why the stock market crashed. That's why there are no jobs. That's why the treasury's empty. That's why the world trade centers fell, all because of the Bush bastards and their greed, and the idiotic Democrats, who refused to fight back, who refused to list the facts.

You watch, in a few years, Poppie Bush will die, and the idiot Democrats will line up a hundred-deep to tell what a great president he was, and say, twenty years from now, Bill Clinton's going to die and line up a hundred-deep and tell about what a lying son-of-a-bitch he was, and how he destroyed American, and the idiot Democrats are just unable to learn.

Gee. I should mention that on the page sometime.


[First published April 17, 2009]