Recently I began receiving threatening and anti-semitic comments on my blog. You may or may not have seen them. The name and email address associated with them belong to a local blogger, Chris, with whom I am acquainted. Of course it isn’t him who is leaving the comments; one can put in any name and email address one wants.

Chris told me that someone has been leaving similar impersonated comments on other local blogs. I’m just the latest.

Doing a whois on the IP address leads nowhere. Or rather, leads to an anonymizing service–a dead end. You’d think that if someone was making threats you’d be able to go to the company, perhaps through the police, and demand to know who the perpetrator is. But no. In theory, it works that way. In practice, it does not.

But there are things I can deduce without this information. First of all, the person is local or has local ties. Who else would be impersonating a local in order to comment on local blogs? The Cheddarsphere is a small place. Nobody who lives in Toledo gives a shit what we say.

That being the case, it also seems likely that it’s either another local blogger or a regular commenter on one of them. Perhaps even someone I’ve met before in person, such as at gatherings of local bloggy-type people.

And of course we can assume it’s someone of decidedly conservative political opinion. No liberal is going to get that heated over the things I write here.

So. A conservative local, who’s known in the local political blogosphere, who knows how and why to use an anonymizer, and who’s a big enough asshole to leave these kind of comments.

Guesses?

Or perhaps the individual himself would care to weigh in on my deductions.

Another thing I feel pretty confident about: Anyone who’s too chickenshit to sign his own name to his remarks is extremely unlikely to represent a genuine threat of any kind. Fear not for my safety, dear reader. And stay tuned for the next hilarious example of just how nutty local conservatives can get.