who comes up with this stuff?

over at lgf, obdicut has identified what is clear to him to be some deranged, possibly bigoted nonsense, and asks the question, "where do they get this stuff?"...

Hezbollah is in Mexico? Where do these loonies get their conspiracy stories from?

the answer, of course, is from charles...

Pipelines Smuggle Terror-Linked Aliens

If the next big terror attack is carried out by someone who crosses the US-Mexican border, the Bush administration will have hell to pay

Hizballah's Presence in the United States

if war breaks out between Iran and the United States, how effectively could Iran launch attacks inside America?

The answer is not comforting.

Hizballah Drug Cartel in Ecuador


Canada: Infested with Hezbollah


Obama Campaign Met with Hamas and Hezbollah Supporters

...and there's more of course, but my interest wanes.

this is now a sort of pattern between charles and his minions; a minion will pick up on some "wingnut" meme and question just what kind of nuthouse produces such ravings, not realizing they're in that very nuthouse being watched over by the alpha psychopath who popularized it.


there's another pattern to be observed here specific to the post in question. it's about the emerging "gunwalker" scandal by which obama's justice department encouraged and underwrote with the intention of observing the illegal trade of over a million dollars worth of firearms to mexican drug cartels. the conceived outcome was nebulous; the idea being that the guns themselves would act sort of like tracking dye which would reveal the big fish in the mexican drug trade. however, the guns were never tracked and never revealed any such thing. the result was that the u.s. justice department armed mexican crime syndicates with a massive amount of firepower. to make matters worse, there was deliberate inter-agency opacity. the guns have turned up in hundreds of murder scenes on both sides of the border, including one in which a border agent was mudered.

that's the gunwalker scandal. now, admittedly, it doesn't rise to the level of the scandal of michelle bachman confusing lexington new hampshire with lexington Massachusetts, but one might expect a blogger as serious as charles takes himself to have reported on it. but he hasn't. he explains why:

I’m still waiting to see if the “Fast and Furious” scandal ... is a real scandal or yet another fake right wing outrage, but I’m currently leaning toward the latter option.

in other words, he won't report on it as long as it's a story which makes his team look bad. he's going to hold his penetrating journalistic instincts in reserve until it becomes a story about bad republicans being bad. this "it's not news until an anti-conservative angle develops" strategy has appeared in charles non-coverage of other stories, such as the acorn scandal. (see footnote)

charles was impatient this time, however, and decided to generate an anti-conservative angle all his own using what appears to the only trick in his blogging bag: cherry-picking nasty comments from anonymous commenters at other sites and making them the story. and so that is what comprises charles' first post on the months-old scandal:, five comments from a single user nic a fox news website presented thusly: "the Fox News audience reacted like this..."


charles also says "I strongly suspect [gunwalker] will turn out to be another fake or overblown right wing outrage".

charles has a lousy batting average with that sort of thing, doesn't he?

*charles also ran with the meme that daryll issa, the republican congressman who is taking the lead in exposing the scandal, was briefed early on in the operation, but raised no objections at the time. it is now coming to light that these "briefings", held only when congressmen began asking questions, were deliberately obfuscatory and that information was held back. this scandal-within a scandal appears to include violations of the whistleblower act. (link)