Wow. Today marks ten years of IMAO. When I started out I was twenty-three and a bachelor living in Florida, just some dingus who decided to put his view online, and now I’m thirty-three and married with a daughter in Idaho and I’m a published author and get published in an actual newspaper. It’s been quite a journey, and I wonder if we have any readers who have been with us all ten years. Probably not, because by most accounts I got much less funny over time and had to downgrade to less discriminating readers.

So what were those ten years like? Well, here’s what I remember. IMAO was started on July 9th, 2002, on blogspot. On August 15th, 2002, I put up the Nuke the Moon essay, widely considered my last original idea. On October 7th, 2002, IMAO was moved to its own URL, IMAO.us, since IMAO.com was owned by a Korean handle manufacturer. Soon after I had a slogan contest and adopted the slogan “Unfair. Unmedicated. Unbalanced.” To celebrate the new slogan, I stopped taking my medication. It was about that time that time a new commenter named “Harvey” appeared. And then the next nine years were kind of a blur. And then it was today.

Well, I guess a few more things happened than that. I mean, I’ve been blogging like every week day for ten years. I have like a million billion posts now, and I don’t even remember most of them. Like look at this one from 2003. I totally don’t remember it. What was I even talking about? Who was Richard Gephardt?

I guess you could probably piece together the last ten years of America’s political history just by reading through the archives here and at the previous version of the site. There’s probably a lot more strangling there than recorded elsewhere.

Anyway, I plan to keep up blogging for another ten years, as this blog has already brought me so much. Like remember when I had that scam where I had a contest for a “t-shirt babe” to find if I had any attractive readers and it totally worked and now we’ve been married since 2005? And then there were those podcasts we did which were a lot of work but were good memories.

And who knows what I’ll be blogging in the future. Over the next ten years, I plan to become the most famous political pundit and also a best-selling novelist. So ten years from now, my posting here will be even more stale, but each post will get like a hundred praising comments anyway because I’ll be famous and people will want to suck up to me. At least that’s my goal.

So, thank you so much to everyone who has read me throughout these ten years. I had a few things to say, and just needed an audience to say it to. And then it eventually became about how can I make more money through writing. And then I made more money. That’s why America is so awesome: freedom of speech and cash prizes. And now we continue onward as normal… except now I have this new phrase “In my ten years of blogging, I never…” I can use when I want to act outraged by something.

Be honorable, ronin. I forget where that comes from.

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UPDATE: Linked by Dean’s World

Year by year, some of the great posts in IMAO history:
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2002 – Gotta Nuke Something – Frank never actually posted his world famous Nuke the Moon essay at IMAO. He posted it to some random server and just linked it.

2003 – In My World: Rumsfeld Vows to Kill Everyone and Then Sing Kumbaya

Last Thursday, demonstrators vanadlised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s New Mexico home to protest the war. Recently, protestors returned to Rumsfeld’s home again, this time decorating the trees around his home with their own entrails.

“Was this new vandalism not actually a form of protest, but in fact the result of you viciously murdering the protesters then dismembering their corpses as a warning to others?” asked a reporter at Rumsfeld’s press conference.

“My lawyers told me not to answer questions about the matter,” he answered gruffly.

“Then might we at least ask who’s blood it is that you’re currently caked in?”

“Again my lawyers told me not to answer questions about that matter.”

“Aren’t your lawyers in fact dead?”

“They kept telling me what to do.”

2004 – We Must S.M.I.T.E. Our Enemies! – Frank releases the top secret plans for his new space-based laser platform.

2005 – IMAO EXCLUSIVE: NEW SCOTUS NOMINEE – in light of Roberts’ decision on Obamacare, you might wish Frank’s prediction in this post had been correct.

2006 – End the Fear-Mongering: Facts About Muslims

2007 – IMAO invents lolterizt!

2008 – You Should Vote for Me: An Editorial by Senator Barack Obama – it’ll make you nostalgic for the days when Obama was just a struggling, unknown presidential candidate, and not the man who singelhandedly destroyed this country.j

2009 – Where Obama Went Wrong – More nostalgia, from back when Obama had only done a handful of things wrong.

2010 – Is Science! Just Pushing Us Around?

2011 – Testing Shakespeare – This one is even funnier now that the world knows about The Choom Gang.
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On July 9th 2002, Frank J. posted:

Hooray! A new blog! There’s lots of stuff I felt like spouting off about, so here I am. Just as a warning, everything written here is in the most unrefined form and should not be used as an actual opinion.

Which is undoubtedly the worst first post on any blog ever.

Come to think of it, his last post wasn’t very good either.

But in between, there was a bunch of really good stuff.

Which we’ll be reminding you about incessantly all week.

Meanwhile, tell us how you’ll be celebrating IMAO 10th Blogiversary Week.