Please may Penny be excused from the blogosphere today?

...I've got a terrible case of pissiness, and just looking at all the flak that's gone down over the McBride/Draper scandal makes me want to vomit up my own pancreas in disgust. In case you've spent the whole day in a chocolate coma, it being the day on which we commemorate the baby jesus detonating into confectionary godhood, here's a useful rundown of the bitching, sniping and apologism. Together with yesterday's thoroughly rubbish performance by the black-mask protest gang, I have been taking a day solidly out from leftist writing, determinedly not getting involved in the squabbles, and instead reading comics and eating croissants in my grottiest underwear.

For the record, yes, I do write for Labour List, and I've had a lot of fun doing so: the stuff I do is quite far left for the site's audience and it's been gleeful and instructive to have an audience of crusty old recalcitrant quasi-libertarian dad-a-likes to smack down. The site has been a worthwhile project in that it brings together some real radicals in conversation with government policymakers, but it's been woefully on-message so far. This, in fact, was most of my reason for getting involved, and it'll be my reason for staying involved if the site manages to struggle through this fiasco.

I am appalled at the smear campaign plans, mainly because, as Sunder Katwala so rightly pointed out, the 'Red Rag' site was designed to be a *cough* leftist alternative to Guido Fawkes. Guido Fawkes (Paul Staines), in case you hadn't noticed, is a frothing right-wing anti-political arserag, a misogynist, a suspicious white stain on the face of the blogosphere. The last thing the left needs is to emulate him. Despite this, to most of us wanting to get involved in real ideas, Guido is irrelevant. So it's thoroughly shameful that Draper and co. have developed such a schoolboy obsession with his thoroughly mediocre work.

The political blogosphere is, in fact, more than a sleazy sideshow of arrogant white middle-aged men wanking angrily at each other. We are better than this.

Sunny has the best commentary I've seen on the whole shambles, over at Liberal Conspiracy:

If you’re pissed off by this whole episode - and everyone involved - then it’s obvious what the task ahead is. There’s no point complaining about it. If we want the left to succeed and not be killed off by the libertarians, conservatives or New Labour, then we have to do it ourselves. Otherwise the likes of Derek Draper and Guido Fawkes will end up dominating the conversations.

I'm sick and tired of having to listen to these guys, the shouty white male bullies on the internet and the shouty white male bullies at the back of the protest, just because they happen to shout the loudest. They're as bad as each other. Sniping and in-fighting is the worst quality of British politics, and when we allow ourselves to succumb to it we reduce ourselves to the lowest possible level of debate. We become bitter.

Today, I am ashamed of the British left, on and off the web. But I believe we can do better than this. I believe that - as long as certain almost universally male comrades learn to share the platform, drop their pointless schoolboy obsessions, understand that smears and violence acheive nothing, and grow the hell up sharpish - we can be better than this. Who's with me?