Our good admin (praise be to him from whose servers these contentions are dealt) sees "The very first sentence of [rc's] post [as] a swipe at Bill." Since it was a simple sentence with none of the spaghetti of parentheticals, subordinate clauses and discursive asides—not unlike this one, by Jove—to which I am, alas, prone when the fit is upon me, which have been known to tax the concentration of them as move their lips when they read, it should be pretty easy to parse:

Frankly, this jerk has it coming from the TSA (emphases added):

I think we can agree to exclude the concluding "(emphases added)" as a mere technical component, just as the commencing "Frankly" obviously serves here merely as a bit of rhetorical throat-clearing (although, my dear friends, if we few, we happy few, cannot be frank here in our Socratic give and takes, why then I don't know what this wicked world is coming to). Surely the mere act of introducing the Transportation Security Administration into a topic does not now count as an automatic affront to His Patience, does it?

Could it have been the word "jerk?" I do recall this being lobbed around during the recent "Kip Hawley" slanging match, but it was generally in use to describe the presumptuous passenger with the sharpie and the ziplock bag; applied as well, with lesser frequency, to the TSA goon. No reason to associate it with Beep, unless...

It must have been the italics. It must be that "this jerk" was taken to mean "as opposed to that other jerk, Bill Patient." Not at all. It meant {a hypothetical member of the class of persons named Robert Johnson} as opposed to the aforementioned presumptuous passenger. The "has it coming from the TSA" element was intended as meta-sarcasm: not that "Bob Johnson" deserves or doesn't deserve the, heh, trifling inconvenience of being pulled out of line whenever he attempts to fly, but that this treatment will be coming from the TSA since we have it on unassailable authority that his name is never coming off the list.

Glad I was able to clear this up.

And all disingenuousness aside (at my mark...now), the post was not conceived or composed as a "swipe at Bill," and I found his response a little creepy. Honest, I can get liverish about the encroachments and idiocies of the Security State without reference to Beep's opinions, such as they are, on this teeming compost heap of issues. When I wish to raise the issue of his attitudes toward these outrages you may rely on me not to bother with the kind of subtle indirection you apparently descry here.

cordially,

...so there is nothing here to buy or sell. And I am moderately offended at your post, which appears to suggest that in making an explicit statement of what my motives were and were not, I lied. The word "jerk" was thrown around rather liberally in the late TSA pissing contest, and not by Beep alone. In employing it on behalf of the Robert Johnsons of the traveling public I consciously echoed that earlier thread, and unless unbeknownst to me Beep now holds exclusive rights to the word (maybe he does—I understand that the Patent Office has been known to grant some pretty broad and outlandish applications these latter years) it was reasonable for me to do so with the expectation that the issues and not the personalia were being evoked.

I assure you that I have not been so shattered by bepatient's devastating ripostes as to have recourse to misrepresenting my intentions. When I wish to be personally disagreeable you will never find me disavowing that stance, and I rather resent your contrary imputation.