wrist action

charles johnson promotes the work of serbian genocide denier.

2012-01-22T13:59:00.001-05:00

serge Trifkovic was refused admission to canada because, as an official shill for the serbian government of the 90's, he prefered to refer to only the "alleged" massacre at srebrenica as "the myth of the bosnian holocaust".

he aslo wrote a book titled "sword of the prophet" which charles was a huge fan of. check it out:

Religion of Slavery
FrontPage has more interesting excerpts from Dr. Serge Trifkovic’s new book The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam, focusing on Islam’s wretched record on slavery.

No Golden Age
Several readers have emailed about this article at FrontPage, consisting of excerpts from a book by Dr. Serge Trifkovic titled The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam: The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth.

Trifkovic: National Review, CAIR, and My Book
Srdja Trifkovic reacts to the CAIR campaign against National Review and Trifkovic’s book The Sword of the Prophet: Caving In to Jihad: National Review, CAIR, and My Book.

National Review Caves in to CAIR
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is crowing tonight about forcing National Review Online to remove advertisements for books critical of Islam:

Islam: Religion of Peace?
Mark your calendars for 3 pm this Saturday, when C-SPAN will broadcast a panel discussion featuring Joseph Farah, Daniel Pipes, Serge Trifkovic, and Kenneth R. Timmerman, titled Islam: Religion of Peace?

Islam's Immigrant Invasion of Europe
Another sobering article by Serge Trifkovic examines the Islamic diaspora and its implications for Europe: Islam’s Immigrant Invasion of Europe.

per charles, this means everything published at littlegreenfootballs is a bunch of scary lies you should run away from.

lgf charles: liberal plants and extreme comments

2012-01-16T19:23:00.002-05:00

charles has been spending much of his time engaged in pathetic twitter wars and he can always find an eager opponent in andrew breitbart. these tweetwars are generally about comments left at breitbart's various sites which charles has cherry-picked and presented as representative examples breitbart's thinking. now, there are a lot of ways to push back against the sophomoric tactic charles is plying here; perhaps the most dignified method is to point out how sophomoric it is.

but breitbart has chosen instead to come back with the broad allegation that objectionable comments at conservative blogs are the handiwork of progressive agent provacateurs merely impersonating conservatives with the intent of tarnishing the good name of the conservative blog-o-sphere. the problem with this tact is not that such things never occur. i personally caught a specimen of this particular variety of troll by the toe once...

the problem with it is that unless breitbart is able to demonstrate that the specific commenters who posted the specific comments @Lizardoid and @Eboelert are pointing to are in fact liberal trolls, then he isn't doing anything but opening himself up to further derision. the empty, generalized allegation sounds like a conspiracy theory, and even if you are willing to admit that it does happen sometimes, it can't possibly explain away every objectionable comment at every conservative website. breitbart makes it worse by then double-dog-daring charles and boelert to "prove" the negative proposition that liberal trolls don't leave objectionable comments at conservative websites under the guise of false conservative identities.

charles is over the moon with this, of course. at his blog, he is taking special delight in showily scoffing at the notion that anyone could dream up such a wild conspiracy theory:

139 Charles
It's funny - wingnut blogs are starting to delete racist comments now, but only because they believe leftists are planting them.

141 Obdicut
Do they actually believe their own bullshit about that?

144 Charles
The dumber ones probably do. The smarter ones know they're lying.

it's a whirlwind of fail, but it needn't be so. the phenomenon breitbart cites is known well enough that there is a name for it: moby. the term was first formally defined at .... littlegreenfootballs:

An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.

...and though today charles scoffs at the very idea of such a thing, it wasn't always so:

One type of troll we see all the time at LGF is known as a “moby,” after the pop star Moby—who publicly advocated posting “false flag” comments at right wing web sites, posing as extremist nut jobs, in order to discredit those sites.

charles has even claimed to have positively identified one or two in the act, as i did above:

...I made an interesting discovery. This stalker was using one of its accounts to post really extreme anti-Palestinian comments at LGF. Comments like this one (now deleted):
When you put your life on the line to protect worthless scum like terrorist scum like all Palestinians are, you get what you deserve. I don’t want to hear any of the PC police come here and say that not all Palestinians are terrorists, yes they are ! Those people are the absolute scum of the earth. It’s like they have some genetic mutation in all of them. We need a final solution to the “Palestinian question ”, if you know what I mean.
That comment was deleted within a few minutes of being posted, of course. “Final solution,” indeed.

But the important thing to note here is: this creep was what we call a “moby,” calculatedly posting over the top comments to discredit LGF. In truth, as you can see by following the link to the “Anti-Neocons” site above, this stalker is rabidly pro-Palestinian—but it was posting rabidly anti-Palestinian comments at LGF. This is solid proof that at least some of the comments at LGF are being planted with deliberate intent to deceive and defraud.

in fact, as i noted elsewhere, this sort of claim was a major component of charles' defense strategy when comments at his own blog prompted an fbi hate crimes investigation. perhaps for breitbart's part in these little twitter battles, rather than try to get charles to grant him a premise he's disinclined to, instead let everybody witnessing know that charles knows for a fact that the premise is valid and disputes it dishonestly.

phony outrage over "loyalty oaths" or just forgetful?

2011-12-29T15:06:00.002-05:00

so, presumably to mitigate the offset of the 36% of democrats and 41% of "independents" who comprise ron paul's base of support, the virginia gop is planning on having primary voters sign a "loyalty pledge" agreement stating that they'll vote for the gop candidate in the general election.

having lived longer than fifteen minutes, i predicted that this would set off a storm of fulsome moral shock on progressive blogs, and sure enough i was correct. allow me to reproduce some examples from rawstory:

This highlights the difference between Republicans and Democrats. If the Democrats tried this, their voters would refuse to participate in the primary.

Damn the GOP and the south. You want civil war I'm locked and loaded. Bring it ASSHOLES!

You vill stand vizz your feet together und raise your right hand to zee fatherland.Seig Heil!

After you sign the GOP loyalty oath you have to raise your hand in the Sieg Heil fashion, click your heels, and then cry because it's a moment that means more to your life than your wedding vows, your high school graduation night, even more than partaking of the bread and wine at your church.

From Blogger Pictures

OMG...now they're telling people how to vote. Fascists...everyone of them.Who's taking away your freedoms now baggers?

"Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid, daß ich dem Führer des Amerikanisch Reiches und Volkes, Mitt Romney, dem Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht, unbedingten Gehorsam leisten und als tapferer Soldat bereit sein will, jederzeit für diesen Eid mein Leben einzusetzen.

You say you are a member of the party but PROVE IT! Maybe Party members should wear an arm band, little band of red with a white circle and an elephant superimposed in the circle? Oh Red Team, how you long to have torch lit parades down city streets in the middle of the night. Oh how you wish you could wipe America clean of all the black people, the gays, the secularists, the muslims, the immigrants.

More evidence that the right-wing does not believe in democracy.

Loyalty Oath? Told ya the GOP is trying it's best to resurrect Fascism. What next, armbands or pins to easily recognize the 'loyal party members"?

An unconstitutional tactic borrowed from the KKK.

...so you see, a lot of that comparing public figures to hitler stuff progressives are notably averse to, but my favorite was the first one i quoted, because it perfectly sets the table for anyone with a memory of the previous presidential election to eat their lunch. because in 2008, the democrat party had primary voters sign loyalty oaths and progressive commentators were apoplectic at the notion that gop voters didn't take them seriously. progressives actually wanted the election boards to monitor conservative websites and track down interlopers and put them in jail. enjoy the video:

lgf charles ron paul

2011-12-29T08:40:00.000-05:00

a couple of people around the net are giving charles credit for being on the cusp of this "ron paul is a cranky racist" thing way on back in the day. the short story on this is that charles didn't begin attacking ron paul to keep paul's racism out of the gop mainstream. charles began attacking paul to keep doubts about the war on terror out of the gop mainstream.

back in may of 2007, when charles first became annoyed with ron paul's internet swarm spamming his site's straw polls, he was still pretty cool with racism. he was writing paranoid screeds about how the mexican border should be policed like the israeli-palestinian border. he was playing the reverend wright tune and the obama is a secret muslim tune and even the obama's grandmother confessed she was a muslim to the kenyan media and then lied about being a christian to the american media tune. he had defended ann coulter's remarks about the need for jews to be "perfected" by conversion, and when progressive bloggers quoted him saying things like "I guess they wouldn’t be Arabs without the ability to hold dozens of contradictory opinions simultaneously" he would dismiss it all as a smear and post something about how islam is a "Cult of Blood and Death". these were the storied days when johnson never wrote the word "racist" but enclosed in scare quotes.

charles' annoyance with paulnuts spamming his polls rapidly developed into an unabiding resentment of the man himself. the line of attack he chose was to lump him in with the antiwar left. oddly, the first mention of the infamous newsletters emerged in this period. however, the quotes charles took stern objection to weren't the ones about martin luther king's secret paedophilia, but the ones in which paul detailed his foreign policy isolationism. in the meantime, it wasn't that charles was unwilling to sling around charges of racism and antisemitism. it's that he was only willing to sling them at progressives.

it wasn't until october that charles found a new line on paul. quite by accident, while tracking some poll spammers back to their lair, he ended up at the white supremacist website, stormfront, where he discovered that nazis like ron paul.

The Paul-Obama Isolationist Convergence

The Ummah Hearts Ron Paul

Dem Candidate Links to Neo-Nazis

Neo-Nazis Heart Ron Paul

TNR Notices the ‘Ron Paul Political Report’

yadda yadda yadda. you get the picture. the bolded part of what i wrote is what i wanted to get across. i lost interest when i started digging through the archive because, well, there's an overwhelming load of objectionable stuff in what could be analogized as "the charles johnson political report".

another irony in all of this new scrutiny coming from the left of paul's cranky associations is that the first people raising hackles about this were the opposing schism of the libertarian movement - the dreaded "kochtipus" the left has spent the last 18 months trying to destroy with conspiracy theories and violent demonstrations. in fact, pretty much the whole of the conservative movement and the republican party have been stalwartly and stridently against ron paul since he first appeared as a gop candidate in 2004. the most recent discussion of paul's cranky-racist-fringy newsletters was prompted by a piece written in the conservative publication, the weekly standard.

and it was this period from 2004 to recent months that the same progressives - the ones who were engaged in destroying the cato-koch schism of the libertarian movement - were starstruck with paul and trying to enfold him into their own milieu. now, despite that 87% of paul's supporters identify themselves as democrats or independents (not to speculate on what portion of the remaining 13% are monkey-wrenchers falsely identifying themselves as republicans) progressives want to use paul's newsletters to paint the entire republican party with their content.

a final thing to note of charles johnson's role in this is that this is yet another example of charles receiving credit for lifting something which emerged from freerepublic, the site which was his source for both his ron paul newsletters "scoop" and his rathergate "scoop", and also a site he now smears as a bastion of hate-speech that he never liked.

lgf charles: attribution of credit

2011-12-02T17:59:00.001-05:00

it's been said elsewhere, most notably by aceofspades, that charles is something just short of a complete content thief. he doesn't claim credit for others' content, but he's meager in dispensing credit to those who pass him content and fails to correct third parties when they praise him for content passed to him by others. basically, he spends all of his blogging hours prosecuting personal grudges while his readership sends him links to all the actual news items he posts. for this service, they sometimes get a "hat tip" acknowledgement at the foot of the post (which charles abbreviates to "H/T:"), often not. other bloggers stopped sending him tips because charles breaks and terminates the chain of cross-linkage by linking to the source, rather than to the blogger who sent him the link.

this post is a fine example:You Won’t Believe This: Women For Herman Cain

it's about the "women for cain" site, of course, and charles pursues two things about it: that the women pictured in the site's masthead are from a stock photography site and one contribution from a woman with creepy eyes and an absurd belief that cain was financially supporting a woman and keeping their relationship secret from his wife because he is a generous man and anonymity is keystone to the christian doctrine of charity.

run the post over a couple of times, click on all of the links. done? okay. here's what you might have noticed:
- no credit is given, not even a "hat tip".
- all of the links are to the primary source (e.g., the link to the stock photo angle goes to the stock photography site the image was purchased from).

this, despite that charles' awareness of the story came from this pages post by iceweasel, who in turn got the story from talking points memo. the irony there is that tpm is credited right at the head of iceweasel's post because of a feature built into the pages code by charles so he and his monitors could immediately identify whether the content is from a "bad" source. ad hominem dismissal is employed frequently enough at lgf that charles automated it.

the stock photo angle came to charles from boingboing, and they got it from a blog called cynical-c. i know that because boingboing actually sends you to cynical-c in their link for the story. like you're supposed to. finally, the "creepy eyes lady" angle comes from a comment under the iceweasel page by wrenchwench.

charles grabbed all this together and posted it under his name without a shred of acknowledgement given to the people who originally worked it out. whether they care or not, i don't know. however, one can't help but recall that charles flipped the fuck out that one time someone failed to credit him scrupulously.

lgf a-list comenter magical balance fairy's self

2011-10-16T09:34:00.002-04:00

the formerly rightwing, rightwingconspirator, just got back from the "occupy la" franchise of the lauded "occupy wall street" demonstrations and he liked what he saw...

The RW extremists are full of crap, as always.... Very little craziness. No tension. Festival communal atmosphere.... The strangest guy I saw there was a chemtrail advocate in a purple suit. (shudder) Oh and the Communist party has a booth. No big deal.

the moment was so inspiring to him he couldn't stop issuing commentary about it.

99 Rightwingconspirator
Sometimes it's just all about seeing for yourself. I could get behind this thing. I really could....

despite being mesmerized by the historical moment, rwc has really only one conditioned response to a protest demonstration, and so he posts the picture of the "chemtrail nut" in a fashion meant to be ironic, one supposes. charles jumps in with a dose of double-reverse self-unaware irony, saying:

See, there's proof! They're all loony chem-trail weirdos!

it's your choice after that: was charles' unintentional self-burlesque the instance of lgf mbf-ing itself, or was it when gus802 shot back as if the photo had issued from the "wingnut blog-o-sphere", ...

Yeah. Luckily for the Tea Party folks they don't have any chemtrail kooks.

No wait! They do.

********THE TEXT BELOW THIS LINE IS AN UNRELATED THOUGHT I MAY OR MAY NOT COMPLETE AT SOME JUNCTURE BUT WILL REMAIN BECAUSE NOBODY READS THIS SHIT ANYWAY************

and they'd be correct. i bet i could search and search all day and not turn up a single instance of a progressive remarking "here i present you with this single image of a single tea party protester holding this single sign and so it follows that the entire tea party movement should be understood in light of the least charitable interpretation possible of the same." this is where the rhetorical tools of the unqualified assertion and the generalization and pluralization of anecdotes perform their magic, because i can easily find you thousands of examples of progressives issuing pronouncements similar to "they are motivated by racism" or "they are nostalgic for a time when minorities and women knew their place" because "they hold signs with the n-word on them".

******

some facts:

during the entire first eight months of the tea party movement, the news divisions of abc, cbs and nbc did 13 stories on the tea party. so far, in the initial ten days of this ows protest movement, the same three major networks have done 33 stories on the ows protests, not including briefs and mentions. that’s a quantitative point: if we assume all other things to be equal, we can say affirmatively that the mainstream media deliberately tried to starve the tea party movement of oxygen for as long as it could while, in contrast, the mainstream media began promoting the ows protests as soon as it could.

there are many qualitative points to be made (when the mainstream media did begin to cover the tea party movement, it was from the outset with an agenda to characterize the movement as “angry” and “extreme”) but if we must further indulge this narrative about “the rightwing media” being hypocritical in it’s differing coverage of the tea party and the ows, i’d prefer we stick to quantifiable metrics like the one i produced above.

there is nothing more pathetic about the left’s phony charade at being the underdogs of the media narrative than the fact that the charade is only sustained for as long as one can pretend that the only news network in existence is fox.

************************************************
i absolutely agree. there have been just about zero clashes with police at tea party demonstrations. there have been many arrests of ows protesters. in one case, an ows protester stuffed his foot under a parked police motorcycle and wailed around on the pavement in a clownish pantomime of "don't taze me bro!", adjusting his foot from under the front wheel to under the rear wheel in the course of his display. this was meant to manifest evidence of police brutality, a necessary component in any fantasy narrative of a noble peasant's twilight resistance struggle against the king's legions. the tea parties have forgone this sort of risible nonsense not because they fail to grasp the potency of theater, but because they are, like most ordinary folks, put off by public disorderliness. they never required a michael moore to remind them that the police are people too.
it seems like you're suggesting that it was an error on the part of the tea party movement to secure permits for their demonstrations and avoid defecating on police cars; that locking arms and charging at the police makes for exciting camera-bait, and i don't doubt you're correct for a certain set of circumstances. however the strategic wisdom of not misbehaving seems to have been the prudent choice for the tea party movement. being as it is a movement identified with conservatism, the mainstream media was eager to portray them as, at first, "angry" and then subsequently, "extreme", "crazy", "racist" and finally, violent and nascent terroristic, despite having behaved themselves scrupulously.

"occupy wall street" fauxtography: unexpectedly expected outrageous outrages (and the inverse)

2011-10-05T07:22:00.003-04:00

there is much to say about the general pallor of hypocrisy dressing the left's new protest movement, "occupy wall street". the movement identifies it's model in the protests in tahrir square which rapidly developed into an armed revolution against egypt's corrupt dictator, hosni mubarrak. the egyptian protests inspired uprisings throughout the region, including the uprising in libya which the u.s. supported militarily. representatives of the "occupy wall street" protests have also been candid about about a second, more local model: the conservative "tea party" movement. one suspects that if the tahrir square is the declared theme of the left's new protest movement, it's actual melody, tempo and muse is the tea party they despise.

but the comparison of the one to the other is nowhere to be seen. instead, a mixture of amnesia and cognitive dissonance prevails. though a few months ago, political discontent was a peculiar form of unqualified irrationalism which could only be explained by racism, derangement or deranged racism, it is once again the mark of a beautiful and authentic soul. the theme of revolution, which when invoked by the tea party was to be interpreted strictly as a coded incitement to the assassination of elected officials, is again as patriotic as dissent was the last time the left protested in the streets. no one, per my googling, has even touched the "occupy wall street" movement's implicit comparison of president obama to mubarrak or ghaddafi.

and the reason for that is clear: the constituents of the "occupy wall street" protests are obama's constituents. by protesting goldman sachs, they're protesting their president's cabinet and top campaign donors. it should further be noted that, by protesting wallstreet, the "occupy wall street" protesters are not protesting objects which were not the object of the tea party movement's opposition. the tea party movement also hated the investment bankers and financiers who tanked the economy and rewarded themselves with government bailout money. this message was unheard, however, from beneath the prevailing theme which cast the tea party movement as a radioactive concentration of racist psychotics afflicted with conspiracy theories and violent urges whose influence, though ever waning, was to be regarded as lamentable. the tea parties bear the additional distinction of opposing the party and president which is actually in power.

well, with that, i've said much. much more than is appropriate for a simple lead-in to the lgf-related item i intended to post. on with it, then.

the occupy wall street movement attempted to thrust itself into the media stream by complaining that it was a significant movement which was being unjustly ignored by the media. the tea party tried this tactic as well, but with less success. even when tea partiers rallied in the tens of thousands, the media response was to dispute and define-down the crowd count, which was unprecedented. prior to the advent of a conservative protest movement, the media mainstream treated crowd-counts at protests as an irrelevancy, preferring to pass organizers' and police department estimates. lgf charles was devoted to the notion that the tea party movement "grossly" inflated their crowd stats.

that's one thing to consider, but there are additional points as well. that the people "occupying" wall street are the exact same people charles once abused in the strongest terms on a daily basis is old news of course. two other things charles' built his brand upon were his deeply principled interest in "fauxtography", the deceptive manipulation of images, and a schtick he coined "the throbbing gif".

with all that laid out and in light of charles' new worldview in which all "bad craziness" resides on the right and the left are no longer "LLL" or "moonbats" or "idiotarians" but rather are to be defended as jealously as those on the right who he now brands as "wingnuts", i direct you to this link where someone is picking up charles' slack, replete with a throbbing gif:

what you see here is that the "occupy wall street" folks, in an effort to breath air into the narrative that their protest of just barely over one thousand participants was a significant uprising and therefor the victim of a media "blackout", grabbed a satellite image of another protest from google maps and used photoshop's clone tool to make a publicity photo in which their protest filled the streets.

this would certainly be a sincere "outrage of the day" to wingnut charles, replete with throbbing gif. if this act of "fauxtography" were to become a big story on conservative blogs, the new moonbat version of charles would certainly attack the exposure as a "fake wingnut non-troversy". that moonbat charles is inconsistent in his choice of targets from wingnut charles is, as we said, old news. we've also noted that where moonbat charles and wingnut charles are consistent, it's in the tendentiousness and falseness of his attacks. but to catch a good whiff of charles' inconsistency, you have to compare what the current charles regards as a phony "wingnut outrage" with what charles regards as a genuine outrage divided by what the former charles regarded as a genuine outrage. the formular looks something like this:

f(x) = (a - b) (1/b)

where:

a) is what moonbat charles regards as a genuine outrage; most recently, the story that gop presidential candidate rick perry is proven to be a covert racist because his father leased a hunting reserve on which stood a rock on which the word "n****rhead" had been painted. the unfortunate name was actually a place name (it was a common moniker for mountain ranges and the like before the 80's) and the rock had been painted over and flipped at some point. no one can say for certain whether it was before or after the perry's first leased the land from the childrens' charity which owns it. nonetheless, for charles, this is "perry's n-word ranch" and perry's possible association with something scrawled by someone else not associated with him on a rock on a property he did not own reveals weighty things about him.

b) is what moonbat charles regards as a "fake wingnut outrage", but is in fact nothing more than the conservative internet's response in kind to the perry story in which it is shown that obama shared at least the same relative time and space with black racial extremist, malik shabaz, at a ceremony commemorating the march on selma. shabaz and the president each spoke at the event separately, neither one apparently mentioning the other, but there's at least one image floating around of the two standing within ten feet of one another. phony or outrageous? depends. if it were a standalone story, it would certainly be outrageously phony outrage, but the story is being floated declaratively as a counterpoint to the phony perry story, as if to say, "we can chuck obviously lame memes of tendentious guilt by association to racist stuff too, if you wanna play like that." charles, however, is apoplectic over the story, and has posted no less than four items about it as a stand-alone matter, apart from the context of the perry story. in other words, charles is genuinely outraged at what is supposedly a phony outrage, which is a little hysterical.

1/b) is what wingnut charles regarded as a genuine outrage. in this case, you can take your pick: one blogger has queued up a collection of screenshots of wingnut charles' old postings expressing sincere outrage over black panther party members opening up microblogs at obama's campaign website. you can plug in charles' declaration that obama holds "shockingly racist anti-white views", or you could try out one of the posts in which charles linked president obama to nation of islam leader, louis farrakhan by virtue of the trivia that both of their faces were featured in a collage on a magazine cover.

finally, the output of the function is the worth of charles johnson's output.

charles johnson "flipflop watch"

2011-09-02T04:52:00.005-04:00

back in late 2007, after charles' vaunted falling out with some specific figures within the anti-muslim blog-o-sphere he cultivated, charles was still raising alarm about the "creeping threat of sharia law" in general and with the organization CAIR in particular. his preferred line of attack was to refer to cair as "unindicted co-conspirators" in a DOJ terror-funding investigation (which, in fairness, they were). CAIR, which bills itself as a "civil rights advocacy" group, understandably would have preferred to have shed that stigma, but charles would have none of it. charles was apparently galled at CAIR's hypocrisy in citing the same article in their defense which they had once attacked as unfair:

CAIR Flip-Flop Watch
In the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas, CAIR is trying to be removed from the list of unindicted co-conspirators by arguing that the “stigma” has caused their membership to decline—and to support their case they cite the very same Washington Times article they originally denounced as “biased” and “false.”

...which makes CAIR not very much unlike charles.

you see, charles has recently featured an item promoting a report written by a guardian journalist which is essentially a categorized listing of the american islamophobic movement.

Exposed: 'Fear Inc.' - The Anti-Muslim Hate Industry
I’m proud to share with you today a report that my friend Wajahat Ali has been working on for more than 6 months... on how just 7 groups have given $43 million over 10 years to a small, inter-connected group of people and organizations responsible for mainstreaming fear, bigotry and hate against Muslims and Islam in America.

...

The Network can be broken into 5 categories:

The Money Trail – Funders

Islamophobia Scholars and Experts

Grassroots Organizations and Religious Right

The Media Megaphone

The Political Players

the odd thing about this is that this report appears to be derived from a similar posting at MPACUK from 2008 which listed charles among the lot as one of "The Fringe" who's primary motivation was "racism":

Category 1: The Seed Planters

Examples: Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Bernard Lewis
Usual Profession: Academics
Main Motivation: Zionism

Category 2: The Theological Warriors

Examples: Robert Spencer, Craig Winn, Pat Robertson
Usual Profession: Christian preachers
Main Motivation: Religious bigotry

Category 3: The Media Voices

Examples: Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Ann Coulter
Usual Profession: Radio and TV personalities
Main Motivation: Money

Category 4: The Fringe

Examples: LGF, Joe Kaufman, Jewish Task Force
Main Motivation: Racism

Category 5: The Politicians

Examples: George W Bush, John McCain, miscellaneous Republican politicians
Usual Profession: Politicians
Main Motivation: Need to court the anti-Islam vote

charles was aware of the listing, the first such effort by an outsider to quantify the "counter-jihad" movement, and at the time, he had only dismissive and disdainful things to say of it:

UK Muslim Public Affairs Council Making Lists
If you ever find yourself spending valuable time to compile lists of your Zionist enemies and their secret motivations, it’s a sign that you may need a shrink...

the bloggers involved, umar lee, the writer of the original list charles mocked, aziz poonwalla, the featured blogger who's post charles promoted, and wajahat ali, the guardian columnist who compiled the report poonwalla wrote of, each post of one another and comment on one another's blogs, which is not surprising considering that they are each influential within the american muslim blog-o-sphere. but the derivation from the umar lee post to the wajahat ali report is most clear in a comparison of form. the lists again, side-by-side:

The Seed Planters
The Theological Warriors
The Media Voices
The Fringe
The Politicians

The Money Trail – Funders
Islamophobia Scholars and Experts
Grassroots Organizations and Religious Right
The Media Megaphone
The Political Players

my point in noting all of this, of course, is not to portray lee, poonwalla and ali as "conspiring" toward nefarious ends. the point is to discuss charles in light of his, well, his way, and this brings us back to the part where he attacked CAIR for using the same washington post article toward conflicting ends at different times as it suited their narrative about themselves.

you see, charles also would like to be redacted from a list; the one in which he is listed as a "fringe" "racist" - a reputation he worked hard to earn, and has done nothing of worth to dispel.

orwell would weep

2011-08-12T04:15:00.003-04:00

i know. invoking orwell is second only to invoking hitler, but what other model is better suited for stuff like this?

ADL Statement on 'Pernicious' Shariah Conspiracy Theories
Abe Foxman calls out the Bigot Brigade
Charles Johnson OPINION • Thu Aug 11, 2011 at 11:24 am PDT
Here’s an excellent opinion piece by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, calling on Americans to shout down the Sharia myth makers.

SIGH.

elsewhere, in the pages, another example of the "what kind of wingnut would propagate this garbage" phenomenon:

SpaceJesus 8/11/2011 11:59:00 am PDT
Can we start an LGF meme with Coulter? Ann "The Jews Just Need to be Perfected" Coulter? Can we do that every time we mention her? Please?

sure. just give charles a chance to fix some grammatical errors in a couple of posts about a particular "manufactured media matters controversy" before you lean on that one too heavily.

charles johnson and the oslo terrorist - clearing some tabs from my browser

2011-08-01T04:41:00.004-04:00

charles attacked john paul pagano, one of the few respected writers who has met johnson's popularity as a source on islamophobes with the appropriate chagrin and mindfulness of context, claiming that pagano bears a "grudge" against his site stemming from a scuffle he had with some of his commenters. this appears to be true, but charles would probably prefer that no one pursue the matter further. the "scuffle" was over a remarkably crass post charles published about the father of nick berg, the marine who was beheaded on video by islamic radicals. berg's father made a statement to the effect that he resents that president bush put his son in harms way. charles presented the story to his audience as follows:

Nick Berg's Father Weeps for Zarqawi

The father of Nick Berg is a tool of MoveOn.org and International ANSWER, and he responds in predictable moonbat fashion to the death of the man who decapitated his son: Father of Zarqawi victim draws no comfort from his death.

johnson updated that post several times not to walk back from the ugly sentiment, but to push back forcefully against those who had the temerity to criticize him. pagano's criticism was appropriate and understandable:

What I'm shocked by are the several execrable moral idiots here who watched the video, harvested the kid's slaughter for the orgy of righteous rage it bestirs, and then denounced Berg's father for being "LLL", for expressing bland anti-Bush sentiment because his kid was massacred. Do you have any clue how classless that is? Do you think Nick Berg would want that? Is it possible to be this fathomlessly unaware?

we can't look back into the comments section to see how the argument played out, but it's reasonable to suppose that it concluded with charles banning pagano; similar in many ways to my own experience.

when pagano subsequently raised the fact that johnson was mentioned numerous times in the oslo terrorist's manifesto and cited the collection of screenshots of johnson's memory-holed hostings of fjordman's essays at diaryofdaedelus, johnson attempted to shout the fact out of the room by tweeting to the effect that "pagano hangs out with serbian genocide deniers!!" which is johnson's shorthand calumny against diaryofdaedelus.

to describe diaryofdaedelus in those terms is basically a lie. diaryofdaedelus is a meta-blog dedicated to mocking littlegreenfootballs and exposing charles' hypocrisy. the narrow agenda accommodates a wide-ranging audience. it's contributors include people who never stopped being islamophobes as well as people who never were islamophobes and who's connection to the pre-2009 lgf consisted solely of criticizing the blog's hate-mongering. the "serbian genocide denier" is one guy, formerly "rodan" of lgf. as i suspect he was when he was getting hat-tipped and updinged by charles at lgf, his contributions are in equal measure frequent and worthless, filled with errors of logic and grammar. the material cited by pagano is from chen-zen, a center-left poster who was a critic of lgf when charles was promoting fjordman's essays as "must-read" material.*

in any case, charles attempts to delegitimize pagano's tweet with this ad hominem claim despite charles himself having propagated the false claim that the oslo terrorist was fjordman. charles' source for the claim was the norwegian national socialist party.

and that was the least of it from a week in which johnson managed to insinuate himself into the media mainstream as the primary source that the oslo terrorist was incited by pamela geller, that geller had "blood on her hands" and that geller had revised an old post of hers to cover her complicity in encouraging the violence in olso, ALL WHILE IGNORING:

1) charles johnson was the original "bigot blogger" who was on the scene when breivik is adduced to have begun planning his attack.

2) charles johnson plucked geller from his own comments and established her blogging career.

3) charles johnson promoted and hosted fjordman's essays.

4) charles johnson profligately blogged about norway's "muslim problem" in apocalyptic terms.

5) charles johnson himself is positively cited in the oslo terrorist's manifesto...

6) ...more than twice as much as geller, and...

7) ...in such a way that one must conclude that charles johnson's website was the oslo terrorist's portal to the other writers he cites.

8) charles johnson has unethically revised posts on his blog, deleted more than one hundred others, and blocked archive.org from cacheing his site in order to hide his past statements from scrutiny.

in fact, "ignoring" is the wrong word. johnson threatened a columnist at forbes magazine with a libel suit this past week for merely stating the minimal case that breivik had apparently read his site.

johnson hasn't been able to memory hole any more of his posts. there are complete archives of his site available to those who know where to look and any further shennanigans would be noticed. i did notice a small change when browsing through johnson's old fjordman posts, answering the question of just what kind of people johnson was promoting when he was frequently speaking of the "muslim menace" in norway and what his attitude was toward catching out potentially dangerous racial ideologues before they act on their beliefs.

the thread is "Finnish Mindcrime Watch"

Finnish Mindcrime Watch

Finnish blogger Mikko Ellilä has been notified that he will be interrogated by police under Finland’s “incitement against groups” law.

all is well there. the thread is intact, but notice that charles has gone back and truncated the link. the link originally lead to this item at gatesofvienna: Muzzled in Finland. what you find by following through is that the man charles is trying to make a martyr of in his "mindcrime" post was espousing racial nationalist views which were noxious enough to get him booted from the anti-jihad group blog he had been posting at. the particular post which brought him under investigation is translated here: (link).

perhaps that's not a big story, but something worth noting in passing as charles is making a big stink about geller whitewashing norwegian extremism from her blog. that charles is an abject hypocrite on this matter is old news, but it's worth revisting with the knowledge that the extent of johnson's unethical revisionism of his own blog is yet unknown.

i'd also like to thank richard silverstein for allowing me to derail a thread on his blog to discuss johnson.

if you click over there, check out the poster what calls themselves "chayma". what a character, no?

*not that i really feel obligated to do this, but chenzen is my only conduit of communication with diaryofdaedelus, and i've not been silent when the vintage lgf'ers have made excuses for racism.

charles johnson: the mastermind who hid behind a pointed finger.

2011-07-29T00:45:00.011-04:00

it may be that geller and spenser and fjordman and the rest are corrosive people trading on bigotry. there are many people who knew that at first glance. perhaps the ability to see these people for who they are at first sight is a better benchmark for clearsightedness than the ability to hate them in suspiciously lugubrious terms only after plucking them from obscurity, establishing their blogging careers, and supporting them for nearly a decade.

it's not absolutely clear that johnson "came to his senses". rather, it appears more likely that johnson was offended that geller and spenser had challenged his authority. there was no disagreement on any of the themes which would later comprise breivik's manifesto, only on who geller and spenser should disinvite to the brussels conference vlamms belang was to participate in.

a fair reading of the the back and forth bears that johnson pursued his hatred of geller more doggedly than he did spenser or the others, and more doggedly than geller or spenser ever reciprocated. johnson's geller obsession had the appearance of a jilted lover's vendetta. the corrupt and personal nature of johnson's vendetta against his former comrades was evident in the way charles posted the false meme that anders breivik and the blogger fjordman were one and the same and left it on his front page for 72 hours without commentary. johnson, who had been commenting about fjordman's blogging of the aftermath of the oslo bombing, knew it was a lie. johnson's source for the claim was the norwegian nazi party. johnson, however, had a deeper itch to scratch: the meme he was constructing was that the bomber was a fan of fjordman, and geller had invited fjordman to guestblog at her site. without mention of the fact that charles had been a fan of fjordman and reproduced volumes of his writings, charles was able to construct a headline which put the primary object of his obsession, geller, in his headline.

the one measure johnson skipped prior to becoming a strident and vocal opponent of islamophobic bigotry happens to be the only one which is required of a morally serious person. charles johnson has never said anything similar to "i was a racist and the ideas i advocated were wrong."

for a long time before the oslo bombing, johnson's attacks on geller were mainly limited to her deranged conspiracy theories about the circumstances of president obama's birth. johnson's outrage about the thematic content and rhetoric of the anti-jihad movement and it's bloggers didn't manifest itself until geller and spenser organized their protests against the "ground zero mosque", as they called it. it was at that point that johnson began saying things about islamophobia which were in jarring conflict with what he had been saying just weeks prior. for instance, johnson had just previously described the lead clerical consultant for the project an "islamic supremacist" who sought to institute sharia law in the west. in preparation for his new line of attack against his former comrades, he deleted that line, along with several paranoid posts about the "epidemic" of muslim inbreeding and the proposed flight 93 memorial, which he had said was being covertly designed to act as an "islamic victory shrine", and dozens of his posts which hosted, praised, congratulated, thanked and otherwise supported geller, spenser and fjordman.

when this revisionism was discovered by third parties, he undertook the additional measures of having google and archive.org delete and cease to cache his website and permanently hid user site content behind a registration wall. it's because of this last measure that no one can see for themselves whether anders breivik had a posting account at johnson's site.

the one measure johnson skipped prior to becoming a strident and vocal opponent of islamophobic bigotry happens to be the only one which is required of a morally serious person. charles johnson has never said anything similar to "i was a racist and the ideas i advocated were wrong." instead, he would rather we believe that the anti-jihad movement became racist at some point while he remained heroically unmoved, moored to the the rock of reason and decency; that geller was just some pest from his comments section he hadn't the administrative tools to block from his site; that spenser was a mephistopheles who made charles do what he could not know was wrong; that fjordman somehow forced himself through the door and onto the pages of johnson's site and wasn't in any case obviously noxious at the time; that johnson himself never said any of the things he can be demonstrated to have said and that those with the temerity to remember lie with their screenshots and direct quotations. to imagine it from the perspective of the narrative johnson presents, the walls peel away to reveal a dark and foreboding wilderness. everyone else changed into monsters while johnson, pure as a child standing barefoot in his pajamas and clutching his teddy, looks on in horror at what had been his bedroom.

not quite so, i'm afraid.

littlegreenfootballs was the hub of the “counter-jihadist” movement. pamela geller herself was a protege johnson plucked from his own commenting community. this was also the case of fjordman, who initially began as “norwegian kafir” at littlegreenfootballs. when he changed his name to “fjordman” and opened his own blog, johnson featured fjordman’s essays as headline items more than two dozen times on his blog, giving fjordman de facto “guest-blogger”credit by prefixing his authorship to the headlines. these posts (i.e.; “Fjordman – Scandinavian Rape Epidemic”) were not less racist or extreme than what fjordman writes contemporaneously, and johnson’s own lead-ins to these pieces, as it was with his own rhetoric, often surpassed fjordman’s and geller’s with luridly racist vitriol (i.e.; “If you’re a Western material girl thinking of marrying that exotic Muslim guy who’s been treating you like a princess, you may want to read the fine print.”).

to imagine it from the perspective of the narrative johnson presents, the walls peel away to reveal a dark and foreboding wilderness. everyone else changed into monsters while johnson, pure as a child standing barefoot in his pajamas and clutching his teddy, looks on in horror at what had been his bedroom.

not quite so, i'm afraid.

with that in mind, there is some confusion as to whom breivik does and does not apparently admire in his manifesto, as the bulk of it’s 1500 pages is comprised of reproductions of others’ works. breivik mentions geller in his own pen only once. he also mentions chalres johnson only once in a neutral citation. at no point does breivik “attack” or “condemn” charles johnson. these passages, as well as all of the rest of the citations, are second-hand from essays written by fjordman. in this collection, one can easily find breivik quoting fjordman praising johnson, and even breivik quoting fjordman quoting johnson’s own hate-speech directly and admiringly.

by this method, johnson and his website are supportively referenced in the breivik manifesto more than twenty times, more than geller in fact. the bulk of these are because when breivik reproduced a fjordman essay, he referenced the essay as hosted by johnson, because johnson’s site is apparently where breivik read them. this should surprise no one. breivik, geller, flordman, spencer (who’s blog, “jihad watch” was coded pro-bono by johnson himself) are the crowd which johnson cultivated.

it’s sickening to see johnson is being allowed to exculpate himself with a couple of convenient denunciations. johnson has never chosen to have an “i was a racist, and now i regret it” moment. only a sustained “those people over there are racists and i’m going to make them regret it” moment with his finger pointed at the figures of a movement he created from the ground up and has only recently parted company with.

absolution comes after reconciliation.

oslo bombing: an experiment in prognostication

2011-07-22T17:05:00.003-04:00

UPDATE: Oslo Bomber cited charles johnson in his internet postings

t least seven people were murdered by a bomb set off in the government offices in oslo today. the story is developing. i have no idea who specifically is responsible and i have no interest in guessing while the sirens still blare and the dust still settles.

i do have one prediction, though, and i'm going to see how correct it is right here before your very eyes. my prediction is this: somewhere in the thread relevant to the bombing in oslo at littlegreenfootballs, there will be at least one mention of republicans or teabaggers.

i know this sounds like a petty and small commentary in light of the ongoing situation in oslo, and i mean no disrespect toward the dead and injured, but if i am correct in my prediction, i would certainly have uncovered a level of commentary quite a bit more petty and callous.

on my honor, i have not looked at lgf yet today. having said that, i open a new tab...

...thirteen comments in, albusteve is the first to mention republicans in a bizarre non-sequitur:

well, they are back, whoever they are...wonder how long before the GOP tries to slash funding for the NSA, CIA, Pentagon intelligence, satellite intel etc etc...

...but that's not exactly what we're looking for.

...spacejesus get's the ball rolling...

What the hell did Norway ever do? I can see why conservatives would hate it, as it stands as a shining example of successful socialism, but what the hell? Norway?

...recusancy replies...

well... islamists are conservatives.

...obdicut piles on...

Well, Al-Queda are pretty damn conservative.

...it's the lgf a-listers. not newbs or "sleepers" or "trolls".

ericus58, in reply to obdicut, betrays the community's disappointment that this terrorist attack, which has killed at least seven so far, can't be pinned on their domestic political enemies...

If only he actually meant that group of conservatives...

...sanfransiscozionist enters the discussion concealing his disappointment with sarchasm...

It's a long way from bitching on Hot Air to car bombs in Oslo. OK, the Tea Party is also ruled out, barring further evidence.

...obdicut comments a similar vein...

The Tea Party is ruled out because of incompetence.

but the party isn't over. the thread predictably veers from the news of the attack and towards scrutiny of the comments sections of conservative websites. in the midst of this sickeningly inappropriate partisan sneering, they have the moral blindness to critique the relative "classiness" of pamela gellar's post on the subject:

151 Killgore Trout
Pam Geller...

But remember, jihad is not the problem. New York's 911, London's 7/7, Madrid's 3/11, Bali, Mumbai, Beslan, Moscow ... is not the problem. "Islamophobia" is the problem. Repeat after me as you bury the dead, "Islamophobia is the probem, Islamophobia is the problem."

Classy.

some of the other items (implicitly connecting the attack in oslo with norway's progressivism) plucked from conservative blogs by the lgf a-listers are almost as crass and inappropriate as the lgf a-lister's own comments. if it appears my criticism is selective here, i hope i can be permitted the perennial liberal caveat that it is not their cherry-picking which offends, but their hypocrisy in doing so.

it isn't entirely so, though. to react to a terrorist bombing on another continent with free-association with one's domestic political opponents isn't just crass, calumnious and anti-pluralistic. it's also absurd and a little bit crazy in a way which isn't concealable with a "sarc tag".

and i knew that it was what i would find at lgf before going there, because it's always like that.

who comes up with this stuff?

2011-07-09T02:08:00.005-04:00

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)

then and now

2011-06-10T00:00:00.001-04:00

charles today:

To comment on the Rep. Weiner scandal, Sean Hannity invites Mark Foley.

Good freaking grief, people.

...

Mark Foley is about one inch away from being a child molester. This is unbelievable.

charles then:

...the page to whom Mark Foley sent explicit instant messages was 18 years old at the time

...there are PDFs of an IM exchange from February 2, 2003. The page in question apparently turned 18 on February 23, 2003.

Does anybody but me think this is the stupidest, most insanely overblown scandal yet?

in any case, i sent out a sarcastic tweet an hour ago, before i went looking in the archives:

@Lizardoid remember the deranged conspiracy theories you promoted about seekrit internet militias hacking foley's email? you were saner then

i was wrong to be sarchastic. charles did promote a deranged conspiracy theory or two in foley's defense.

in any case, does anyone even remember the fact that, after all of the gay-baiting and hem-hawing about foley's apparent crime of the century, that the democrat who picked up his seat had a sex scandal of his own in which he paid off a member of his campaign staff to the tune of $150,000 to keep quiet about their affair?

PS: was weiner talking with underage girls?

Mark Foley Emails Altered?
Charles Johnson
Mon Oct 2, 2006 at 8:40 am PDT • Views: 188

Now the Mark Foley story is getting weird. (Yes, I know it’s already weird, but this is weirder.) There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that Foley’s guilty of making advances to teenage boys—after all, he resigned—but there’s something very odd about the email messages being circulated by media and left wing blogs: Foleygate: Mark Foley emails altered.

More at Flopping Aces.

UPDATE at 10/2/06 9:07:44 am:

More links and background at Michelle Malkin: Predators in the House.

Fever Swamp Blogs Hid Foley Evidence?
Charles Johnson
Wed Oct 4, 2006 at 8:34 am PDT • Views: 277

There’s now evidence that the fever swamp blogosphere (led by the vicious John Aravosis, who runs one of the ugliest of the lefty hate sites, Americablog), deliberately concealed information about Mark Foley for months without any concern for potential victims of Foley’s advances, so they could spring it on the public at election time. Gateway Pundit has a roundup: Get Your Lawyers… Foleygate Scandal About to Bust Open!

(And please note, because I know someone’s going to try this tactic: this post should in no way be construed as a “defense” of Rep. Foley, whose actions are completely inexcusable.)

Foley Scandal: Cybersex Between Two Adults?
Charles Johnson
Wed Oct 4, 2006 at 5:31 pm PDT • Views: 275

If what Passionate America claims to have discovered is accurate, the page to whom Mark Foley sent explicit instant messages was 18 years old at the time: Meet Jordan Edmund One Mark Foley Instant Messenger.

UPDATE at 10/4/06 5:33:11 pm:

This is now the headline at Drudge Report.

UPDATE at 10/4/06 6:02:39 pm:

Allahpundit emails to say there are PDFs of an IM exchange from February 2, 2003. The page in question apparently turned 18 on February 23, 2003.

Does anybody but me think this is the stupidest, most insanely overblown scandal yet?

UPDATE at 10/4/06 6:23:03 pm:

Still there’ll be more: The Bogus Blog Behind Foley’s Fall. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

rep. weiner is a perv who stalks young women with his twitter account

2011-06-02T21:06:00.006-04:00

i have yet to find a blog post on the weiner story which puts it in those terms, but that's the story. representative weiner was found to have twitted a picture of his dick to a young lady on his follow list. it was subsequently discovered that a significant portion of the people rep. weiner follows on twitter are attractive young ladies half his age. so that's the story; rep. weiner is a perv who stalks young women with his twitter account.

should this be a huge scandal which drives a week's worth of the news cycle? i dunno. i know there would be a certain consensus on the facts of the story if rep. weiner were a republican; the consensus would be that weiner is a perv who stalks young ladies through his twitter account and the consensus would be expressed by democrats developing it into a massive crime of hypocrisy which defines the whole of the republican milieu while republicans name-dropped clinton and kennedy apropos of nothing in an effort to assert that "both sides do it" while never addressing their side doing it in concrete terms.

but weiner is a democrat, so different procedures obtain. there is no consensus that the thing happened at all. rather democrats have exploded in a spray of nonsensical denial and obfuscation. underlying all of this is the notion that scandals of sexual imprudence can only attach to republicans because republicans profess standards of sexual morality. hypocrisy is the only sin progressives are bound to acknowledge. unless the matter is hypocrisy in the morality of wealth; in which case progressives are guilty only of coping excessively well in a world of wretched capitalism they did not create.

with that as a sort of hazy occlusion hanging in the background, progressives are at the forefront attacking the source. the story was broken to the mainstream news by andrew breitbart, you see, and it is said that breitbart is a known and consistent liar. that's more truism than truth of course, and when the claim "breitbart is a liar" is closely interrogated one finds that what is designated a "lie" in that formulation is more like "omitted context", and even that is a dubious claim. for instance, when media matters sought to establish the "omitted context" relevant to the clip of shirly sherod released by breitbart, they refered to parts of her speech which were in the clip breitbart released. still, progressives dug up and posted the entire hour-long speech on their blogs, as if to establish a standard by which any truncation of any comments of any length comprises an act of "lying by omission". similarly, when breitbart released clips from a university lecture lead by an iww fossil extolling the virtues of "monkeywrenching" and intimidating scabs at their homes, progressives scanned the unedited footage for "missing context", and what they found were comments to the effect of "it is unfortunate that such measures are sometimes necessary because the man is so evil." if you fail to see how that mitigates anything, you're not alone, but the "breitbart lies" via craftily "omitted context" meme had become so well-established that university officials parroted it in their statement dismissing the matter. breitbart is often hard to listen to with his 24-7 pose of high moral dudgeon. he sometimes puts his foot in his mouth and swallows, but he isn't a liar. his stories consist of opposition figures caught speaking frankly on video. if it were otherwise, he wouldn't be so successful in getting his stories picked up by a mainstream media apparatus which allegedly despises him. the blogger who fed breitbart the story, a twitterer named "patriotusa76" is now having his real name and personal emails bandied about with the suggestion that his discovery of weiner's dick-tweet is less credible because he had been paying particularly close attention to weiner's twitter account. finally, jim hoft, the blogger who filled out the story by showing that weiner had a suspiciously high proportion of young, attractive girls in his follow list is supposedly the real pervert for looking.

so you see, not only are democrats by definition immune from sex scandals, there is a harsh penalty for even observing one.

and yet the story continues because the primary player, rep. weiner, has been so hard to pin down. his case this: his account was hacked, but the picture of his dick may well have been his own. while alleging that his account has been hacked, he has eschewed a formal investigation into the matter, except by investigators under his private hire, and continues use the very account which has allegedly been hacked. now, at this point, it is yet verging on the ambiguous. it may be that his account had been hacked by someone and the hacker seized the opportunity to tweet a picture of weiner's wiener which may have been taken by weiner himself. however, as of presstime, twitter reports no breaches of any user accounts.

and to go further in this direction, is to tread into the eerie murk where strange thoughts hold court - such that twitter is in on the conspiracy to tweet a picture of rep. weiner's dick to a girl half his age.

this is where charles johnson and his blog, little green footballs, reside.

charles has written fourteen posts on the matter, pasted below in case anything changes. inoculate yourself before reading.

Yet Another Andrew Breitbart Smear Falls Apart Charles Johnson
WINGNUTS • Mon May 30, 2011 at 10:36 am PDT • Views: 45,020

As soon as I heard about the “scandal” involving Rep. Anthony Weiner, and saw it being pushed like crazy by fraudster Andrew Breitbart, I knew it would turn out to be yet another phony story.

And that’s exactly what happened. If you haven’t heard about the latest Breitbart scam, here’s a pretty good summary (but they should check the spelling of their headline): Brietbart to use SEX SMEAR on Rep. Anthony Weiner.

In a nutshell, someone apparently hacked into Weiner’s Twitter and yfrog (a picture-hosting Twitter app) accounts, posted a lewd photo, then sent a screenshot of it to a student in Seattle. Wingnuts, of course, refuse to believe that Weiner didn’t post it himself.

(Update: there was no hacking involved. The photo was never posted to Weiner’s account. Someone may have photoshopped a screenshot of a yfrog page to make it look like it came from Weiner’s page.)

(Update 2: the story changes again - apparently Weiner’s yfrog account really was cracked, and the image was posted there.)

The New York Times has a report, and I have to ask: when will the media stop treating Andrew Breitbart like a legitimate “conservative” source? The article doesn’t even mention the numerous other frauds perpetrated by this right wing attack dog: Congressman Says Hacker Sent Lewd Photo From His Account.

I mean, good grief. This is how they describe the situation:

The episode unfolded Saturday night when it was reported on the Web site biggovernment.com, run by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. It played out all day Sunday on the Internet, with Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents part of Brooklyn and Queens, addressing the matter on his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, and with bloggers from the left and the right arguing about whether this might be the start of a scandal or an example of how easy it is for political rivals to harm each other’s reputations using new technologies.

It just might be an example of how Andrew Breitbart harms people and smears their reputations, because that’s what he does, but you won’t get that context from the Times.

Meanwhile, the student who received the obscene photo is being harassed and stalked on the Internet by deranged right wingers — and that’s also not surprising, because that’s what they do: Student who got lewd pic from Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account denies she’s his mistress.

Cordova said she has been harassed for weeks online after she started following Weiner on Twitter and the congressman added her to the list of about 200 people he follows.

Her harrasser “started posting about me, saying, ‘Oh, the congressman is following school girls,’ tweeting it over and over. It was very annoying,” Cordova told the Daily News. When the crotch shot appeared online, she said the same Twitter user was the first to comment on it.

“Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before, I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the congressman and harassing his supporters,” she said. “Annoyed, I responded with something along the lines of ‘are you f***ing kidding me?’ and ‘I’ve never seen this. You people are sick,’” she said.

Cordova said she blocked her accounts and thought that would be the end of it. But taking down her information only fanned the flames. Cordova said she’s had the worst weekend of her life.

“I’ve watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I’ve ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.

“My friends have received phone calls from people claiming to be old friends of mine, attempting to obtain my contact information,” she said.

“I also do not have a clear understanding as to how or why exactly I am involved in this fiasco,” she wrote.

“I do know that my life has been seriously impacted by speculation and faulty allegations. My reputation has been called into question by those who lack the character to report the facts

.”

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They did a lot more than post a fake story about Tupac -- they stole and released passwords and login information for a lot of PBS users and employees.
***
The wingnut blogs are frothing like rabid dogs over this story, utterly refusing to believe it's a fraud.

At some point they're just going to get so full of rage they'll explode.

Jim Hoft is especially disgusting and stupid, as usual:
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Yes, that's what I posted in the update 2 above -- someone apparently did upload the photo to Weiner's account.

Latest news is that the photo was supposedly retrieved from a cache, and has meta tags that are nothing like the other photos posted by Weiner with his Blackberry.
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Yes, that's what I posted in the update 2 above -- someone apparently did upload the photo to Weiner's account.

Latest news is that the photo was supposedly retrieved from a cache, and has meta tags that are nothing like the other photos posted by Weiner with his Blackberry.
(fire doesn't melt steel!)
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And I think you're a gullible fool, who can't tell the difference between updates as a story breaks and "CYA updates," or between Andrew Breitbart right wing fantasies and reality.
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[this thread containe three deleted comments.]
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Jim Hoft Breaks Own Record for Nasty Stupidity
WINGNUTS • Mon May 30, 2011 at 12:35 pm PDT • Views: 40,042

DERP
All over the Internet, wingnut bloggers are frothing with rage over the bogus Anthony Weiner story, but one nitwit outdoes them all when it comes to nasty stupidity.

And that nitwit is, of course, Jim “Dim” Hoft, who manages to misspell a two-syllable word in his headline: Gennette Was Not Alone… Weiner’s Twitter Friends Include Pages of Young Lucious [sic] Fans | The Gateway Pundit.

Hoft has posted eight photos of women he claims Rep. Weiner is following on Twitter, along with their names; he’s calling out the right wing attack dogs to harass them.

Gennette Nicole was not alone.

On Friday far left Rep. Anthony Weiner said his twitter and Facebook accounts were hacked. He said this after a picture of his penis was reportedly sent out to a young woman in Seattle.
Here’s her picture.

Gennette was not the only young attractive woman who made it on Rep. Weiner’s select list.
More than 45,000 people followed Rep. Anthony Weiner on twitter. He followed only 198.

Here are a few of the people Rep. Weiner looked to for his news and entertainment… But mostly entertainment.

It’s an amazingly sleazy, creepy, and blatantly sexist post, even for the monumentally dense Jim Hoft.

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Instapundit is also busily hyping the right wing idiocy over the penis story.
***
And by the way, there was no hacking involved. The photo was never posted to Weiner's account. Someone crudely photoshopped a screenshot of a yfrog page to make it look like it came from Weiner's page.
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29 RadicalModerate
Mon, May 30, 2011 1:30:52pm
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I know that yfrog probably doesn't publicize this, but I'd be very interested in seeing the IP logs of the uploaded photo in question. I think it is a very safe bet that it will be revealed that it wasn't uploaded from any machine in Rep. Weiner's posession (including the one he was tweeting from at the time when the photo was supposedly forwarded). I'd also bet that it won't backtrace to any machines on Brietbart's domains - he isn't THAT stupid. However, all bets are off for Mr. Wolfe.

30 Charles
Mon, May 30, 2011 1:34:05pm
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re: #29 RadicalModerate

See my comment #24 - there was no uploaded photo.
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re: #34 RadicalModerate

So, the entire event was probably a fabrication created by "patriotusa76" Dan Wolfe, since apparently only he and BigGovernment employees saw the picture prior to its being posted on Brietbart's site?

That's the most likely explanation.

Here's a site that performed an error level analysis of the faked screenshot:

(fire doesn't melt steel!!)

I hadn't heard of this technique before, but it looks like a good way to detect some types of image manipulation. If you go to the home page you can submit a picture file to run the analysis on it.
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This whole penis story is so stupid on so many levels, it's giving me a headache.

It would be a trivial matter to produce a screenshot that didn't need to be photoshopped at all, and appeared to be from "RepWeiner". You can edit the HTML code for the page with Safari's (or Chrome's) web inspector, and it would be totally indistinguishable from a screenshot of a real page.
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re: #44 Killgore Trout

Breitbart's Weiner hoax: New photos surface! Analysis, and Surprise! (UPDATED)

So now they're saying it looks like the yfrog account really was broken into?
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re: #98 ozbloke

You mean like this?

Or like this:

Image: ZZ4AEEF3B1.jpg
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Ooh, Andrew Breitbart's very mad at me. He's about to blow a gasket on Twitter
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Wingnuts Desperately Cling to 'Weinergate'
WINGNUTS • Tue May 31, 2011 at 9:53 am PDT • Views: 31,394

Wow, look at all the hate coming my way through Twitter and email this morning! What’s got those wingnuts all lathered up?

It’s the Anthony Weiner fake outrage, of course! They’re ranting and spewing talking points like a bunch of brightly colored Breitbart parrots.

The bottom line is that they really, really want this to be true, and they’ve already decided it is. And anyone who points out that Andrew Breitbart is a proven liar and fraud, many times over, comes in for the usual right wing vilification and insults.

It’s kind of cute, in a massively dysfunctional way.

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CNN just had Breitbart the Fraud King on, ranting that 'Weinergate' is the same kind of thing as the Mark Foley scandal.
***
The wingnuts are in fine form today. Here's a Redstate post that actually made me laugh out loud:

Hmmm… ‘Tis something in the Wind that makes me think Sarah Palin might be this Generation’s JFK… | RedState
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Video: Weiner Refuses to Answer Questions About Nontroversy
POLITICS • Tue May 31, 2011 at 5:37 pm PDT • Views: 29,229

On CNN, Rep. Anthony Weiner tells reporters he isn’t going to talk about the incredibly dumb “Weinergate” nontroversy. Do you think this is the right way for him to handle the situation?

I don’t know how I’d handle it, but I do know that this is exactly what smear merchants like Andrew Breitbart count on. If they can get their target into a position where he has to deny their accusations, there’s just no way for the target to look good. If he denies, he looks like he has something to hide, and if he says he won’t talk about it, he also looks like he has something to hide. He can’t win. No matter what Weiner says at this point, it’s going to be used to make him look bad.

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Man, the right wing blogs are in a total feeding frenzy over this story.

Am I ever glad that I'm not associated with these loons any more.
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Anthony Weiner is being attacked by the right wing because he's an effective voice for the Democratic Party -- and especially because he's calling on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from voting on health care.

This stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum.
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No, no, no! We're supposed to completely forget about Andrew Breibart's history of fraud whenever he comes up with a new fraud. Come on, get with the game.
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In a way, the last three years have been the story of Republicans and the right wing completely abandoning any pretense at ethical behavior, in a naked lust for political power.

The right has lost its ethical moorings, and will now lie, cheat, steal, smear, and libel anyone if they think it will get them the control they crave.
********

Why the Right is Attacking Rep. WeinerPOLITICS • Tue May 31, 2011 at 7:46 pm PDT • Views: 27,953

Here’s the real reason why the right wing knives are looking for Rep. Anthony Weiner’s scalp: Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife received $150,000 from anti-health care reform group.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas released his new financial disclosure form on Friday under pressure from Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and others.

Mother Jones reported that his financial disclosure form indicates his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, received a $150,000 salary from the group Liberty Central in 2010 and less than $15,000 from an anti-health care reform lobbying firm she founded.

Liberty Central, which she helped found, supports the repeal of the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Weiner had taunted Thomas via Twitter on Friday, but his criticisms where quickly overshadowed by the so-called “Weinergate” fiasco that broke out Sunday. The congressman had previously called on Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving health care reform because of his wife’s financial connections to groups dedicated to its repeal.

“The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law,” a letter written by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and signed by 74 Members of Congress stated. “From what we have already seen, the line between your impartiality and you and your wife’s financial stake in the overturn of healthcare reform is blurred.”

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Actually, I know for a fact that Andrew Breitbart is highly connected in the right wing social scene, and I don't think it's at all far-fetched that this was coordinated. I don't know for sure, of course, but the timing is awfully suspicious.
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Next they'll be making a big deal that Weiner said "prank" instead of "hack" in one sentence.

Oh, wait. They already used that one.
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Jon Stewart: Distinguished Member of Congress
HUMOR • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 8:48 am PDT • Views: 22,684

In his disgusting, sleazy appearance on CNN yesterday, Fraud King Andrew Breitbart predicted that Jon Stewart wouldn’t cover the Anthony Weiner story. Oops.

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This is why I post about Jim Hoft. The stupid cretin makes so much ugly noise that he actually gets noticed by right wing media and his stories get into the mainstream.
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The Post story, complete with Twitter nics and pics of a few of the young women.

No doubt they'll start being harassed soon, if they haven't already.
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One of the blog posts I read yesterday said that several people had actually seen the tweet when it was posted.

But that Dan Wolfe guy was flat out stalking Weiner and the young woman in question. The Internet has legitimized this kind of creepy, sick, obsessive behavior to an appalling degree. And now the mainstream media characterizes Wolfe's actions as "monitoring."
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That's my point. You can't block stalkers if you're going to have a public Twitter profile.

This is one of the real dark sides of the Internet. It has enabled this kind of sick obsessive behavior more than any other technology, because stalkers can almost always remain anonymous, while their targets must remain public.
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Breitbart Smear Targets Will Always Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt
WINGNUTS • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 10:12 am PDT • Views: 21,657
Joan Walsh makes an excellent point about the “Weinergate” idiocy — even if it turns out that Rep. Weiner did send that penis picture that has driven right wing blogs into a frothing frenzy, there’s one lesson that should not be learned: Lessons I won’t learn from Weinergate.

However, there is one lesson I won’t learn: I will never, ever take the word of Andrew Breitbart or anyone in his army of political sewer workers, over the word of someone who denies his claims, without independent proof. After Breitbart’s hit-job on Shirley Sherrod, as well as the selectively and deceptively edited tapes he used to bring down ACORN, his victims will always deserve the benefit of the doubt. Especially when, in this case, the target is not merely a politician, but a 21 year old female college student. Once Breitbart “revealed” the supposed Weiner photo, an army of drooling right-wing bloggers published the alleged recipient’s name, along with multiple photos, details about where she went to school and what she studied. Those details ricocheted around Twitter as Breitbots gleefully spread the lurid stories like spitballs. When the besieged young woman (who just happens to be African American) issued a statement Saturday night denying the Breitbart story, I believed her. I would do it again.

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This story may be about to break wide open.

It's apparently possible to post a picture to anyone's Yfrog page without having their password.
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re: #61 Buck

I guess I don't understand. A message was sent from his Twitter account. This needs his password to be done. Forget for a moment the yfrog part. A message was sent from his Twitter account. If he didn't send it, who did? He said he didn't send it. Someone would need his password to do that, and that is a hack (in the same way reading Sarah Palins Yahoo email was).

No, it does not. When a picture is posted to yfrog with that email method, a tweet is automatically posted to Twitter.
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Documented Yfrog MMS Feature Made Framing Rep. Weiner Easy
The best evidence yet that Rep. Weiner is being framed
POLITICS • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 11:25 am PDT • Views: 25,029

Here’s a fascinating new bit of information in the “Weinergate” (ugh) scandal. Apparently it’s possible for anyone to post a picture to anyone else’s account at the yfrog.com picture hosting site — without a password. The trick is to email a picture from a Blackberry to the user’s yfrog.com email address, with the word “@subject” in the text. This results in the picture being posted at yfrog — and a tweet being posted at Twitter with a link to the picture.

The full details are at Cannonfire, and it certainly appears convincing. I don’t have a Blackberry, but LGF reader “ElCapitanAmerica” tried the technique described in this post, and reports that it really does work.

This is compelling evidence that Rep. Weiner is being framed. There would have been no need to hack into his accounts because of this security hole.

UPDATE at 6/1/11 11:45:21 am
It turns out that you don’t have to email from a Blackberry — you just need to use MMS to send the picture, from any device that supports the protocol. I’ve now confirmed that this technique also works on an iPhone.

UPDATE at 6/1/11 2:00:40 pm
It also turns out that this is not really a security hole in yfrog; it’s a documented feature that’s been public knowledge for at least 2 years.

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This is not a "theory," by the way -- it's a documented fact now that it's possible to post pictures to anyone's yfrog account without a password, if you have their yfrog email address.
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That's true, and I've changed the title of this post to reflect that this is a documented feature, not really a security hole -- although it obviously does have security implications.
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re: #155 Sergey Romanov

Charles, that's an interesting bit of info, but I don't think it explains anything in this story. A tweet was sent out from Weiner's account with the yfrog link. This info doesn't explain the tweet.

Yes, it does -- when a picture is posted to yfrog through MMS to an account that's linked to Twitter (the most common way to use yfrog) a tweet is automatically sent to that user's Twitter account, with a link to the pic at yfrog.
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Note that whoever posted this photo through yfrog's MMS did not have to do any exploiting or hacking. This technique was advertised by yfrog as a feature. Nothing secret about it.
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You simply include the text you want to be in the tweet. Tweets aren't "addressed" to anyone in a structured way -- all you do is put the user's name in it.
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re: #251 researchok

When?

Last I heard he refused to say the photo wasn't of him!

He stated VERY clearly that he did not send that tweet.
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Er, no, not really. The yfrog user has to specifically grant yfrog access to Twitter, and can revoke that access at any time. This is how OAuth validation works -- it's not a problem in Twitter.
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re: #365 sattv4u2

Asked twice if the photo was of him

Didn't say "no" either time, except "it doesn't look familiar to me, although I can't say with certaintude ,,,"

Wrong. He absolutely said he did not post the picture or send the tweet.

He said he can't say with certainty that the picture is not of him. This is not the same thing.
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re: #397 ElCapitanAmerica

Sorry, can't agree. The bottom line is that there is NO WAY to handle something like this "well." No matter what he says or does, the media is going to keep going at him.

And as for the right wing, forget it.
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One of the women posted as "lucious" by the creep Jim Hoft is Weiner's sister-in-law.
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Video: Rep. Weiner on CNN
POLITICS • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 4:40 pm PDT • Views: 17,246

Here’s the video of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN. I think he does a very good job of defending himself against an increasingly predatory media; he says very clearly that he did not post the photo and did not send the tweet.

Notice how Wolf Blitzer keeps yanking out the photo. At one point Weiner says, “I appreciate you continuing to flash that at me.”

After today’s revelation about how easy it is to upload photos to anyone’s yfrog account and automatically have a tweet posted, without even requiring a password, I believe him.

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RedState.com dimwit Caleb Howe has absolutely no idea how easy it is to hack a single five letter word: Case Closed? Leftblog Claims Definitive Proof Weiner Was Framed.

These people are such morons, and so incredibly smug about it.
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re: #22 Killgore Trout

I think he's simply trying to be as careful as possible, because he knows it could be an altered photo or one that was taken at an unguarded moment -- say, in a gym. And if he comes out and says "absolutely not me" and then it turns out to be a photo he didn't know about, he'll get clobbered.
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Actually, a blank URL also appears if you send to your own account. That part of the Cannonfire post wasn't right.
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There's absolutely no evidence that Weiner sent the photo himself, and a very compelling argument that the yfrog MMS feature was exploited to do it.
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re: #78 Hawaii69

I would never say "I believe him" or not at this point.

I do believe him. I can't say I'd be shocked to find out that he really did send the pic (nothing shocks me when it comes to politicians), but the evidence we have so far points toward a dirty trick intended to create exactly this kind of media frenzy.
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Rep. Weiner answers the question about Ginger Lee in the video I posted.

Maybe you should watch it.
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The Idiot's Guide to Hacking Yfrog
POLITICS • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 6:31 pm PDT • Views: 16,109

One of Rachel Maddow’s viewers demonstrated today how incredibly easy it is to post a photo to someone else’s yfrog.com account without a password: The Maddow Blog - How one gal planted her boot on the throat of the internet and, with a mighty cry of ‘CAKE!’, slew it in 12 seconds.

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I'm quite sure that yfrog's tech people are scrambling tonight.
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If I were in charge of yfrog, I'd be extremely unhappy about this ridiculous lapse in security.
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No. It's simply the WRONG way to implement security. 100% wrong. Obscurity is not security.

I'm actually shocked that a company with such a high profile is so lax about security. They're going to suffer because of this.
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These kinds of access blocks are trivially easy to get around. Maybe you could get away with that last century, but not now.
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Sorry, you just don't know what you're talking about. This kind of thing is what I do, and I promise you that any web security expert would be horrified at the idea of using a public email address and expecting it to be secure.

It's not secure. Period. This is the wrong approach to security.
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Of course, because there are probably millions of antiquated scripts still using the brute force, hit it as fast as you can method. Spammers are much smarter than that now, and you're not going to catch them that easily.
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Not to brag, but I've been running LGF for close to ten years now, and we've never been hacked. It could still happen, but the reason why we've been secure is because I take these issues extremely seriously.

Yfrog obviously doesn't.
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Public-private key authentication is definitely the best type of web security, but in a consumer app intended to accommodate non-techie users it's just not feasible.

There are still much better ways to approach this situation than a freaking secret email address. Good grief. It really does amaze me that a site with millions of users is so horribly insecure.
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I think this is actually pretty serious. It was an attempt to take down one of the most effective Democrats against the Republican reactionary agenda. Weiner is calling it a "prank," but it's much more than that.
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re: #178 ElCapitanAmerica

BINGO, now I've found 3 words that differ only by 1 character, used for different users ...

You should create an LGF Page to document your findings.
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Post them. Their idea of security needs to be completely exposed, so they'll stop putting their users at risk.
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Video: Rachel Maddow with Anthony Weiner
POLITICS • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 8:03 pm PDT • Views: 15,325

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It was a very serious attempt to destroy the reputation of one of the most effective Democrats in America. I don't think it's strange at all -- it's a political dirty trick that could have had enormous consequences.
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re: #22 Timmeh

If I were planning a serious attempt to bring these creeps to justice, that's exactly what I would say too.

I don't know how this will turn out, but don't make the mistake of taking any of these statements at face value.
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There's an amazing number of loons ranting at me tonight on Twitter. Never seen it so bad.
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Woot. Just went over 1900 followers on Twitter. The more the loons attack, the more followers I get.
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Yfrog has now completely disabled posting pics via email
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Yfrog Disables Posting Pics Via Email or MMS
POLITICS • Wed Jun 1, 2011 at 9:21 pm PDT • Views: 14,542

As of about 9:00 pm Pacific, Yfrog.com has disabled posting pictures via MMS or email.

See:
The Idiot’s Guide to Hacking Yfrog
Documented Yfrog MMS Feature Made Framing Rep. Weiner Easy

UPDATE at 6/1/11 9:38:58 pm
Yfrog says, “No problems here! Everything’s fine!”

RELATED:
Yfrog ‘secret’ email addresses are easy to figure out

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re: #209 ElCapitanAmerica

You know what, I just checked my email logs, and I sent exactly 3 wrong email addresses to my main twitter account, then a valid one and it posted. So they were NOT disabling anything after 3 wrong emails.

This is a very transparent lie. The people who are telling you that yfrog "locks out" an account after 3 tries are simply making it up. The only way they could possibly know that is if they actually tried it themselves. And what "account" could be locked? These attempts would be semi-random - it would not be possible to tie them to a specific account.

The technical term for this kind of excuse-making is "horse shit."
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@yfrog
yfrog
Our recent security audit reported no _system_vulnerabilities_ exist on yfrog.com or been reported by our users. via [Link: fro.gy...]

Yep, they're running scared. They know this could be a real disaster for them.
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Was Rep. Weiner's Account Hacked? The Question is IrrelevantTECHNOLOGY • Thu Jun 2, 2011 at 8:30 am PDT • Views: 10,721

Slate’s Christopher Beam has an article today titled, “Weinergate: Was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked? The evidence for and against.”

And this is emblematic of the rest of the media, because Beam is totally missing a crucial point — there was absolutely no need to “hack” Rep. Weiner’s account. As we demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt yesterday, it’s possible to send a picture to a user’s yfrog account and at the same time post an automatic tweet on Twitter, without ever hacking into an account. This is possible because of yfrog’s MMS posting feature, which is indisputably insecure.

I should say it was possible, because in a clear sign that yfrog knows they have a problem, they’ve now disabled the MMS posting feature completely.

And the simple fact is that yfrog’s email “secret codes” are extremely easy to guess; they’re based on a limited set of characters, and as “ElCapitanAmerica” demonstrated, duplicates occur quite frequently.

Some right wingers trying to keep the attack on Weiner alive have said that yfrog “locks out” accounts after three tries, but they’re simply making this up. The only way they could possibly know that is if they actually tried it themselves. And what “account” could be locked? These attempts would be semi-random — it would not be possible to tie them to a specific account with certainty. So yfrog could very easily lock out the wrong user, and that doesn’t seem like a very sound strategy, does it?

In any case, it isn’t possible to test this now because as mentioned above, yfrog has disabled this feature. But before the feature went away, ElCapitanAmerica did try more than three false account attempts — and there was no lock-out.

Auto-locking an account after a certain number of tries is a technique used to prevent password-guessing scripts, but this is not even close to the same thing. When a script is trying to guess someone’s password it will use the same username repeatedly, and only vary the password — so it’s a simple matter to discern which account is under attack. And even if this technique is used, the account would only be locked for a few minutes, to prevent inconveniencing legitimate users who make mistakes. Yfrog is not a bank; it would be counter-productive in the extreme for them to use these kinds of ultra-secure techniques.

Note that I’m not just making this stuff up; I’ve written code to defeat password-guessing scripts, right here at LGF.

Why are the media ignoring this strongly exculpatory evidence, and continuing to focus on the likelihood of “hacking” Rep. Weiner’s password? Is this too technical for them to understand?

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Banks are a completely different story, for obvious reasons. It would be insane and completely unnecessary for a picture hosting service to use that kind of super-tight security.
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My point is that it can't be tied to a specific account with certainty, as a username/password script could be.
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re: #10 hugh59

So why is Weiner uncertain whether or not the photo is of his shorts? Why not just ask for law enforcement to investigate. If the police or FBI then say there was no crime, so be it.

Do you remember every picture ever taken of you? And even if you think you do, would you be able to say for certain it was you, if someone had made modifications to the photograph?

Rep. Weiner was simply trying to be accurate. He can't say with certainty that it isn't a picture of him, because there's no way to be certain of something like that, in the era of Photoshop.
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What admissions?

He said very clearly that he did not send the photo or post the tweet. How do you get an "admission" out of that?
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I have some boxer briefs that look almost exactly like those. I can't say with certainty that it isn't me, either.
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Lovely attitude. Someone is being smeared with a false story and you're gloating
***

Can you say with absolute certainty that there are no photos out there, anywhere, that would embarrass you if they were posted on the Internet?
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By the way, if this were a court case, the fact that yfrog is so easy to "hack" would almost certainly constitute more than enough reasonable doubt to have the charges dismissed against Weiner.
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re: #125 hugh59

Charles, liberals laughed at fake stories about George W Bush all the time.

So go ahead and be just as bad, if that's what floats your boat. I think it's pretty creepy to do that, myself.
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re: #170 Claire

But it's a secret as long as you are the only one that knows it, right?

The yfrog email address was revealed in many places. It's in the "From" line if you email a picture, it's visible onscreen when you're looking at your page -- very much unlike a password.
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You don't have to be told. It's visible right there on your yfrog page. That's the point. They didn't even try very hard to obscure this.

It's vastly different from a password system, and I'm honestly a little suprised that a company with millions of users is so incredibly lame about security.
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Smoking Gun Investigates Weinergate's Patient Zero
WINGNUTS • Thu Jun 2, 2011 at 11:09 am PDT • Views: 8,959

The Smoking Gun has a very interesting look at Andrew Breitbart’s source for his smear against Rep. Anthony Weiner — the obsessed Internet stalker who went by the idiotic Teabag handle “patriotusa76:” The Wolfe At Anthony Weiner’s Front Door.

For months, Wolfe and several Twitter sidekicks have excoriated Weiner, 46, in the harshest terms. They have criticized his looks, claimed his marriage is a sham, and accused his wife of having ties to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. On May 5, Wolfe floated a rumor that compromising photos of a “big time” congressman were in the hands of a “top 5 Right Wing blogger.” He tweeted, “@RepWeiner are you this Congressman?” He reprised this photo rumor in a May 11 tweet.

As the Weiner story began to spread over the weekend—and detractors started accusing him of somehow hacking Weiner’s accounts—Wolfe balked when Breitbart sought to arrange a conference call to discuss how to further exploit and advance “Weinergate.” In e-mails sent from his Yahoo account, Wolfe asked, “Why does he need to speak with me for this?” and “I’m just not sure why he needs to talk to me. Why is talking necessary?”

He also noted that, “I am having major personal problems right now getting worse by the minute.”

In a subsequent May 30 e-mail, Wolfe expounded on these troubles, explaining why he wanted to avoid speaking with his Twitter cronies. “I have ALOT of personal problems I didn’t want to go into—but as I become the focus of this I am more and more afraid this will all come out.”

Wolfe then went on to state that his ex-wife was suing him for custody of their two children and “for lots of other stuff right now. Her attorneys are after everything I own.” Additionally, he reported that, “I have an ex girlfriend who has mental problems causing issues for me at work. My business is suffering as a result.”

There’s more — read the whole thing.

ALSO SEE:
Did Andrew Breitbart leak embarrassing personal emails sent to him by ‘patriotusa76’?

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Good news: Google Analytics says that for the month of May, traffic at LGF increased by 26.25%.
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FINALLY, charles has written three or four more posts since that last one which were more of the same, but he left one comment which i thought was worth singling out.

146 Charles
6/04/2011 4:04:09 pm PDT +8

Don't know yet whether this is completely legit, but the latest news on the smear attack against Anthony Weiner is pretty interesting -- there may be a new "Wrecking Crew" pulling off political dirty tricks:

[Link: www.dailykos.com...]

this is charles airing what is, by the classical definition, a conspiracy theory. the material at the dkos entry (!, ! and !) is a "red web" of people who follow, and people who follow people who follow and people followed by, patriotusa76. this is accompanied by an exhaustive spreadsheet of all of their tweets for their entire twitter history. though there is nothing revealed therein which proves the "controlled demolition" theory of weinergate, the fact of having compiled these stands as "evidence" of a cabal. a "militia" charged with "pulling off political dirty tricks", no less. all of this proceeds backwards from the conclusion that weiner was framed by patriotusa7 of course.

it goes without noting that there is ample precedent of charles using his blog to promote conspiracy theories.

charles is taken aback by the casual comparison of the peaceful religion of islam to the nazis

2011-06-02T02:01:00.001-04:00

i know. you laughed too.

here he is clutching at his pearls and fanning himself with his hymnbook at the horrifying spectacle of someone making a direct comparison between islam (in his own parlance, the "religion of peace") and nazism:

Pat Robertson: Muslims = Nazis

note, as i did, that there are only less than two hundred comments there, no deletes or downdings. anyone who might have dared to say "hey, waitaminnit..." has been banned. for the benefit of those who are entirely unfamiliar with what charles johnson was about only two years ago, let us do a cursory "hey, waitaminnit..." roundup:

A Neo-Nazi Reverts
Here’s the story of David Myatt, a British former neo-Nazi who found his calling in Islam

...in which charles identifies a white, christian neo-nazi's conversion to islam as a "reversion". get it? not because he was previously a muslem, but because islam is a primative form of nazism.

"Discover Islam" Invites Neo-Nazi to Bahrain
Let’s hold on one little second here, Gulf Daily News. “Christians and Muslims for Peace president Professor Bill Baker” just happens to be the notorious neo-Nazi William Baker, who has manufactured most of his academic credentials, and was fired from Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral when the truth about his connections to Nazi extremist groups came to light.

This man is the scum of the earth, an antisemitic hater par excellence. Just what the Arab world is looking for.

Then and Now, Part 2
... a powerful video drawing parallels between Hitler Youth and today’s Islamic terror groups.

Nazi-Islamist Hatefest in Boca Raton

Arab Nazism: Then and Now
...on the historical and ideological bonds between radical Islam and National Socialism.

this is of course not exhaustive, but these displays of charles' abject hypocrisy do exhaust patience pretty quickly.

charles: associated press is wingnut outlet

2011-05-20T04:05:00.002-04:00

well, they must be, right? they interpreted president obama's "1967 lines" rhetoric to mean the the pre-1967 borders, thus igniting a "wingnut fake outrage". and so the associated press joins the new york times and msnbc as outlets for racist wingnut teabaggery which willfully misinterpret the president's clear statements because they cannot abide a black man in power.

perhaps he should cut them some slack on their flawed interpretive skills. charles himself had to adjust his own post several times before abandoning his central premise that "1967 lines" obviously meant post-1967 lines. what was the real original point of the post? apparently it was that president obama said something which wingnuts are unjustifiably upset by; unjustifiably so not necessarily because they misunderstood him, willfully or not, but because there is no just basis for disagreement with president obama.

actually, it's not quite so. the true root of the matter is that there is no justifiable basis for disagreement with charles, who has no internal means of understanding the world, and so has to anchor himself to an external actor in order to orient his worldview, and the current president (as was his predecessor) is it. to disagree with president obama is to disagree with charles. in fact, the resulting effect is to cause charles to lash out defensively because what has happened is that you have backed him into a corner against the blank, empty wall of his limited intellect. so, when a poster argues effectively that "1967 lines" is universally understood to mean the pre-1967 borders, that obama's outline is the "saudi plan" and represents a break from precedent in u.s. mid-east policy, charles' best response is to down-ding him and insinuate that he is a "sleeper troll".

what more could charles say about obama's endorsement of the pro-palestinian saudi plan that he hadn't already said in 2008?

Obama apparently has been convinced by his gaggle of mildly to extremely anti-Israel advisors that the best hope for change is to give a one-sided deal concocted by a rabidly anti-Israel, totalitarian religious monarchy another chance.

to the question of whether charles has officially "thrown israel under the bus" by this point, do you suppose that this change in charles' positioning on u.s. mid-east policy classifies him as "mildly" or "extremely" anti-Israel?

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one further wrinkle is worth mentioning here. once charles was forced to abandon his "correct interpretation" of "1967 lines", he replaced it with a couple of comments from apparent non-wingnuts lamenting the outrage and echoing the argument that obama's statement was not divergent from the standing u.s. policy as it has been for decades.

conspicuously omitted from this listing was hotair.com, johnson's favorite amongst examples of rabidly racist wingnut teabagger terroristic anti-obama hatespeech. the omission is conspicuous because hotair struck the exact identical position as charles and his examples:

There’s nothing wrong with this statement; it’s a fairly clear description of the position of the US for decades, if less than specific. It’s not new at all, and it barely touches on the biggest problems in the conflict, which is the right of return demanded by Palestinians and the status of Jerusalem. Framing the solution along the 1967 line is one of the recurring themes from the US since at least the Clinton administration, and is hardly unique to the US, either.

some informed speculation: if this had occurred somewhere in the span of two years to six months ago when charles had become rabidly anti-conservative yet remained staunchly pro-Israel, he might have framed this hotair post as evidence of a rising anti-semitism on the mainstream right.

comparisons: trutherism, birtherism and inauguration days

2011-04-25T11:47:00.001-04:00

i prefer to compare inauguration days.

on january 20th, 2001, before bush had yet even taken the oath of office, progressives:
rioted in the streets, clashed with police, set fires to piles of debris, smashed storefronts and lined the president elect's motorcade to a) symbolically "turn their back" on the incoming president and b) hurl garbage and eggs at the passing limo.

by that time bush was already known to progressives as a dry drunk who was raised on nazi profiteering money - who was himself an incarnation of hitler - who had conspired with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines to stuff the ballot boxes, and was in any case taking the oath illegitimately. he was the "president select" (in ensuing years, progressives would encourage unity by drafting a map which suggested that the states which went for bush - the "slave states" dontchaknow - belonged to a separate republic called "jesus land"). bush was said to have been responsible for the lynching of a black man in his state while he was governor. when bush noted in response that the perpetrators had been apprehended, prosecuted and given the death penalty under his watch, progressives adjusted their take on it slightly to allow that bush was actually a triple-murderer.

that was all before bush had taken the oath.

january 20th. 2009 was a little different. one portion of the president elect's opponents spent the day hurling recriminations at one another, rather than the opposing team, while the other portion spent the day drafting optimistic open letters of congratulation about the bright side of losing to president obama and of president obama himself.

in fact, if one were to look for derangement, hate and violent rhetoric on that day, they would find it only amidst the president's supporters who had, to give one example, erected on the mall a mock guillotine for which one was invited to pay three dollars for a chance to decapitate bush.

i think york is right about the comparison of conspiracy theories. the "truther" notion is far more calumnious than the birther idea. a better comparison could be made between birtherism and the "black box voting" conspiracy theory which posits that bush conspired with the top brass at diebold to rig voting machines, as they share the aim of portraying the president's very election to office as illegitimate. to this day i think a poll of democrats would show well over 60% endorsing the idea that bush never legitimately held office.

one final point which bears mentioning is that there is wide overlap between proponents of trutherism, birtherism and black box voting cranks. and though there are leftish conspiracy nuts and rightish conspiracy nuts, they comprise a sort of party apart, with rightish and leftish factions coming together in support for politicians with affiliations as varied as ron paul and dennis kuscinich. the thing to be recognized from this is that many of the same people progressives would like to characterize as rock-ribbed mainstays of the republican base are actually people who they marched with in years past and who possibly still have positive aggregate ratings for their dailykos diaries.

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the common progressive rebuttal is to claim that polling figures which show that a majority of democrats believed that "bush knew" or "bush did it" actually reference the "reasonable" assertion that "bush should've known" based on the famous "osama determined to attack within the u.s." pdb.

of course, immediate action on the contents of the pdb would have been comprised of sending investigators to either lax or dulles to deal with a hostage stand-off, and thus wouldn't have prevented 9-11 at all.

but leaving that aside, it's not true to say that progressives were misstating a belief that "bush should've known" when they said "bush knew". the democrats who say "bush knew" mean that bush had foreknowledge and cynically allowed the attack to happen as a pretext to invade afghanistan to facilitate the construction of a natural gas pipeline. we know this because this was the plot suggested by michael moore in his 2004 documentary, Fahrenheit 9-11, which was praised by democrat leaders for it's utility as a get out the vote device.

there are some unintentionally comical comments over at the politico piece which attempt to find a space of ambiguity in the poll question, ""How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"

that was totally different

2011-04-04T03:34:00.002-04:00

charles:

to insinuate that a comment like "the Muslim rats need to be exterminated" would ever have been allowed here is extremely disingenuous.

of course, who could prove otherwise, seeing as how he deleted all of those comments ~~immediately as they appeared?~~ all at once the day after issuing his "why i left the right" post.

prior to that, they were tolerated - encouraged even - and despite charles' effort to revise the history on this (the viewing of comments prior to 2009 is blocked to unregistered users), the specific text of the sort of commentary charles encouraged at his site still exists in some places, and it indeed matches and surpasses "exterminate muslim rats":

(link and link)

* "IMHO, they should go house to house interrogating every Muslim about what they know and when they knew it. And then kick every last one of them who is there illegally out of the country. And then decide if any of the rest of them deserve to stay. Now, if only Israel would do the same thing after its terror attacks.... "

* "Can we eradicate Islam now, please?"

* "If there are no Arabs there are no attacks. How many more need be sacrificed?"

* "It is now time to force muslims to make a choice: Live peacefully or die. I prefer the latter."

* "We need to stop fucking with these people and kill every one involved. I mean anyone with prior knowledge, anyone who payed for it, and anyone who supported it. Regardless of nationality."

* "If its Islamic it will probably blow up. All Islamic get full body searches with VERY high intensity X-rays ."

* "The best way to deliver those high intensity x-rays is through some W76 warheads at around 100 kt a piece. It will be easier to give a full body search after that."

* "Britain should END ALL ISLAMIC IMMIGRATION NOW....Continuing to welcome the enemy into your country is insane."

* "subhumans, first time on 2 feet...round em all up, every friggin' last one of them...unfortunately, I still think it will take even more violence from the Arabs before the West wakes up and goes savage on em"

* "Martyring Muslims doesn't seem to make much of a difference to the fanatics. What is needed is to take their human capital out their hands - their children. No more warped children, no more jihadis. "

...

# "How can these vermin have a country? How can these vermin be allowed to live?"

# "Vermin love the Slime, and they will hate any attempt to clean up the mess. Our house had become terribly infested with horrible filth. It is to be expected that the creatures living on dirt would resist and fight back. But that is all the more reason to bring to successful completion the cleanup process."

# "Our superiority, militarily and morally, to these vermin is so overwhelming that it would go without saying, were it not for the daily shrieking of the... press."

# "I really don't consider it killing. It's simply [the] extermination of vermin, diseased vermin..."

# "I've been fond of transfer of these subhuman[s] for a while. Perhaps something more like targeted genocide... will become necessary."

# "If every subhuman piece of excrement in the... camp dies slowly and painfully of starvation, I'll have a great [holiday]!"

...which is why this thread is so entertaining. especially in light of this thread:

“Conservative” bloggers, please take note! Glenn Greenwald expects you to be aware of what every right-wing blogger is writing every single second of every day. And if you see something offensive to Glenn Greenwald, you’d better condemn it right away!

Or else you’re a hypocrite or something.

P.S.: this thread also provides a context:

These are (by coincidence I’m sure) the exact same comments cherry-picked by Glenn Greenwald (aka Socky Sockpuppet) in his latest smear job. At least you could do your own cherry-picking, Arianna.

She has one point; extreme comments are not found exclusively on the left. And that’s why there is a very clear disclaimer posted at every LGF comments page, explaining that these comments are only the opinions of the commenters, not of LGF, and that if a comment remains posted here, it in no way indicates approval.

...

And what Arianna’s attacks are supposed to cover up: the Huffington Post carried out a massive purge of assassination-advocating posts, after the spotlight shined on them. More than 400 posts were deleted in one topic on Dick Cheney. Some remnants, and complaints from deleted moonbats, can still be found...

seriously, i have to stop now. this could go on forever.

UPDATE: one more snippet of context...

Most of the hateful content that’s been brought out recently by media has appeared in Daily Kos “diaries.” Diary posts at Daily Kos are not comments; they’re blog posts, by registered users, they’re monitored, and each diary generates its own thread of comments.

And you won’t find a single page of comments at Daily Kos that contains a disclaimer, to explicitly point out that comments are the responsibility of the poster, not representative of the views of the owner.

At LGF, you’ll find such a disclaimer at the top of every page of comments.

Kos wants it both ways; he wants to claim this huge army of readers when it makes him look powerful, but disavow them when they embarrass him.

oh noes, author of paranoid conspiracy hitpiece "intimidated" by foia request

2011-03-27T05:21:00.001-04:00

UPDATE: this morning, martyr for free speech, prof. cronon, adopted a moderation policy of deleting dissenting comments solely for their dissention.

here

i have "kochtopus" fatigue. the genre of activist journalism which deals with conspiracy theories which posit that everybody who disagrees with the progressive faith is an automaton programmed by a shadowy elite has been popular recently. so i'm weary to parse through and point out every question-begging insinuation in the professor's contribution to such nonsense.

there are many in the luridly titled, "who's really behind recent republican legislation?" leaving the title aside ("who really brought down wtc7?" a similarly-minded person might similarly ask), the professor sends inquiring minds to two admittedly leftwing encyclopedia-style repositories of oppo dirt on conservative groups and individuals. why? he explains, "for obvious reasons, many of these groups prefer not to be monitored very closely." what are these reasons? obvious to who? why does the professor withhold from us his insight into the operative preferences of those who prefer to work from the shadows? there is nothing dry about this language. there is also nothing truthful in the insinuation. the professor himself links to the ALEC website where they are pleased as punch to spill the beans on all of their nefarious plans. he even attempts to cash in on their openness in the post above to lend toward the notion that his ersatz "expose" had no agenda noticeable to anyone. what a shock that openness must come to those who caught the professor's hint that they lurk in shadows because their activities are of a character averse to sunlight.

more often than not, interest groups are obscure, and they are nearly always obscure by default rather than design. that is, until they are plucked from obscurity and employed as a character in some grand narrative. that is all that has happened here. the professor's too-ready insistence that he was writing from scholarly interest reeks of horseshit and dirty socks. his insistence in dusting off old tropes about the legendary scourge of "mccarthyism" yields unintentional ironies. here, the professor was doing some mccarthyizin' of his own; researching and cataloging a shadowy malefactor which operates, deviously, under the guise of constitutionally protected issue advocacy, and drawing to it and from it linkages to individuals who were, until these revelations, only suspected to be at war with our precious fluids. the linkages are like a web. but a totally different kind of web from the infamous "red web" of the john birch society. this web is a totally different, not-at-all-paranoid-or-antipluralistic web. and so are sourcewatch and rightwingwatch, completely different from the bircherite "red web".

by the by, did you ever hear of the center for media and democracy? must be because they, for obvious reasons, seek to conceal themselves. did you know that they advocate for policies which are distasteful to many americans? and they accept donations from other groups which you may also be unfamiliar with and pursue similar ideological agendas (cue theremin).

in any case, stinkier than the original article by far is the screeching hypocrisy of the appeal left above. the professor makes a risible attempt to cast his contribution to the kochtopus conspiracy mindset as a work of dry scholarship and, from that footing, cites a privilege of his own imaging which protects the emails of university employees. sorry to burst this delusion, but there is nothing which transpires in the office of a university professor which bears any moral resemblance to what priests, doctors or lawyers are bound to. the professor is smart enough to recognize what the requester is after; he is probably pumping recall petition chain-mails through his office computer and his resistance to comply with the FOIA request does lend weight to such suspicions and the whole spectacle casts him with the appearance of a hypocrite who believes himself entitled to attack the motives and situatedness of others without having to endure the same sort of examination.

he's also smart enough to recognize that he has no way out of this scrutiny he's brought upon himself but to pull on his "academic freedom" underoos, wrap his moral indignation around him like a cape and try to fly out on a gust of hot air.

pamela geller robert spencer

2011-02-17T22:00:00.006-05:00

pamela geller robert spencer

norquist's ankle-biters at lgf: the same, yet strangely different

2011-02-15T02:39:00.004-05:00

remember when lgf cult-member, avanti dredged up the fight 93 memorial conspiracy theory, remarked that such people should be laughed at for their paranoid derangement, and charles promptly went to work deleting his own extensive posts promoting the conspiracy theory?

today's pages post to watch is about pamela gellar's claim that grover norquist is a muslim brotherhood plant. the point of course is to assail gellar for her bigotry - and the fact that this particular attack is readily recognized as bigotry by charles' groupies is an important thing to consider here - but what's also interesting is that the lizards are so concerned with preserving their purity that a simple denunciation of gellar is insufficient. each must first ritualistically denounce norquist as well, lest we assume their attack on gellar is a defense of norquist, because in the glass house of lgf, logical fallacies such as assuming the converse play as legitimate argumentation.

I don't like Norquist at all but if I were him...I have no love for Norquist at all but I feel bad for the guy being equated with a terrorist group because his wife is a Muslim.

I'm hardly a fan of Norquist or his work, and I disagree with him on damn near everything, but...

I'm no fan of Grover either, but...

I would not subject Norquist to the death penalty. Other than that, he can sod off. He's an enemy of the country and the vast majority of the people in it. Next: Koch brothers.

but, as i said, the centerpiece of this is that this particular smear, authored by frank gaffney and now popular with gellar and spenser, which posits that grover norquist is a muslim brotherhood stooge with divided loyalties is clearly and indisputably identified as islamophobic bigotry by charles' groupies:

Norquist can justifably argue that people like Geller, Spencer, and their allies have made it easier to paint the conservative movement as bigots. ... I feel bad for the guy being equated with a terrorist group because his wife is a Muslim.

...all these attacks on him suggesting he's a sleeper jihadi or something because his wife is Muslim are just absurd on their face.

The way Geller, Gaffney, Spencer, and the rest are treating him and his wife is unacceptable and incredibly bigoted.

the best comment is from "orionxp":

4 OrionXP
Mon, Feb 14, 2011 3:57:39pm +2
Good lord, when Grover Norquist is being tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, you really know the right wing is out to brunch, lunch and Thanksgiving Dinner.

orionxp, lidane, decaturdeb, et al, meet your host:

A Troubling Influence

A must-read article by Frank Gaffney on the connections between conservative activist Grover Norquist and radical Islamic groups: A Troubling Influence. We’ve been trying to blow the whistle on Norquist and his ties to the worst fifth column elements in the US for quite a while, and this piece by Gaffney is the most detailed and damning indictment yet. Read the whole thing; it’s quite scary.

and there's much more in that vein...

White House Muslim Advisers

Here’s a development long overdue: conservative political activist Grover Norquist is coming under serious criticism for facilitating improper access to the White House for radical Wahhabi Muslim groups: Conservatives clash on Muslim Bush aides. Norquist has responded by calling critics “racists” and “religious bigots.”

as far as gaffney is concerned, charles wasn't just a big fan for most of his career as a blogger (check any post listed here prior to 2009), but also an ardent defender (PBS Picked Radical Islamist to Review Suppressed Film)

if history is any guide, we can expect the record to be "corrected" on this matter and little green footballs to grow ever littler.

as expected, charles lies about me.

2011-02-06T02:50:00.003-05:00

i wish that i had in this moment the wherewithal to address each of charles' attempts to whitewash his history in this thread. perhaps it will have to wait for this article he intends to write. but in another thread, we see charles taking a more familiar posture:

For those following the soap opera at home, the stalker who goes by the name "wristactionadmin" is a banned LGF user, who previously posted comments here with several names: "jummy," "hiney von pewps," "reasonable_man," and most notably "-=@$$=-" ...

Would you be surprised to learn that he's a Paulian?

here, charles tells a couple of lies.

one is implicit. it isn't his "scoop" to note that my nic at lgf was -=@$$=- or that i was banned. in fact the specific post that he cites as proof that i'm a "paulian" was featured at my own blog. i've told the story of that post at powerline and paterico as well as other places.

i am not, of course, a "paulian" and the post he links doesn't demonstrate any such thing. this is nonetheless what charles wants to make of it because it's the best he can do with the things i've written at lgf, where my history is one of publicly disapproving of the bigotry which used to permeate his site at a time in which he nurtured it. charles has known that jummy is wristaction is -=@$$=- for as long as i've been writing about him and this is the first time he's pulled it out because he knows as well as anyone reading it that what is depicted is charles banning me for showing a resemblance between charles' boilerplate rhetoric about muslims and the sort of stuff said by white supremacists. this is why charles has described me as a "lefty stalker" in every other instance of him discussing me on record. in some sense, charles has always maintained that not being a racist creep was a particularly "lefty" quality. i've never believed that, but it does lead one to question what state of mind charles was in when he was deliberately and relentlessly steeping himself in what he contemporaneously identifies as racism.

it's a desperate move.

i've also, on my own website and elsewhere, identified hiney von pewps as my nic, and told that story as well. briefly, a couple of years after charles banned me for opposing racism at his blog, i learned second-hand, from hotair (where i've posted as "jummy" and "eh") no less, of his admirable stand against bigotry vis a vis the anti-jihad conference, and that he had been cleaning house. this seemed to indicate that he was finally taking racism seriously, so i thought it was worth registering again. i posted precisely three comments: one in which i heaped sincere praise on him for his apparent evolution, one in which i asked about a technical glitch, and finally, one in which i asked if he was moving in the direction of jon cole. charles banned me and then lied, saying that i had six sockpuppet accounts.

i've had two - not six. not four. not three - two consecutive accounts which were separated by a span of months. one was not a "sockpuppet" for the other, and with each i've written only what is consistent with what i might have written anywhere under any name.

i do recognize the other two nics. jummy is what i generally post with. this and the other are nics i tried to re-register with shortly after the second incident. each of these were blocked before i was able even to log in. consequently, i've never posted under either of these nics. i attempted to re-register because it's not unexpected that when one is lied about, one is eager to refute those lies at the site they are issued. charles can't have it that way, but i thought you'd be interested to know that this is another example of charles being his unfortunate self.

charles at tpm

2011-02-03T05:29:00.005-05:00

i hate to bump a fresh post from the front page, but charles has again ended up on the pages of a publication he once smeared. this time it's tpm, and the prudent thing to do is to preserve my comments here in case charles whines to the admin and has them deleted.

the thing you have to know about charles johnson is that he did not passively experience racist conspiracy theories crowd out legitimate discourse on the right. he was the vanguard of mainstreaming rightwing hatespeech on the internet. this is true in every specific sense.
charles was blogging that obama was a seekrit commie and a seekrit muslem long before glenn beck had a show on fox. charles was an anti-latino bigot, blogging paranoid screeds about "reconquista" and la raza. charles mainstreamed anti-muslim paranoia.he popularized the special language of islam as it is used abusively by bigots (e.g., dhimmi, taquiya, etc.). for charles, islam was a "cult of blood and death", muslems were "koranimals" and "oil tics", and the imam behind the "ground zero mosque" was an "islamic supremacist." his posts only on the election of the the black muslim congressman, keith ellison, should provide sufficient demonstration of his bigotry (link: * ).
progressive bloggers were a "fifth column"complicit in arab and communist conspiracies to destroy the united states. he was an early progenitor of soros derangement syndrome and nearly every figure of the new media of the left, especially huffpo and dailykos but including josh marshal, has a slanderous entry in his site's archive dedicated to them. correspondingly, there isn't a figure on the right he now slanders that he didn't once defend jealously. rush limbaugh was an "honorary (member)" of his site. he linked glen beck's msnbc exposes as "must watch" material. he defended ann coulter's antisemitic "perfected jews" remarks.
if this is easy to forget or forgive (it shouldn't be), it may be because charles has taken the measure of revisionist deletions of his past paranoid anti-muslim bigotry and professional association with anti-muslim bigots (link: http://wristaction.blogspot.com/2010/09/charles-johnson-of-lgf-now-deleting.html ). subsequently, he excluded cacheing spiders from archive.org , google, yahoo and had his site's caches wiped from the wayback machine and other internet archive organizations. this is remarkable since much of charles' milieu had been comprised of "catching" selected enemies in the act of supposedly cleansing their websites of compromising posts (link: http://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&q=site:littlegreenfootballs.com+%22memory+hole%22&aq=&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=4ef1ed213f96a03d dkos: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=11884&only=yes obama: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30243_Obama_Campaign_Throws_Antisemitic_Blog_Down_the_Memory_Hole ).
the unprecedented thing about this - the thing that makes all of this so hard to take is that charles has maintained that he was never wrong about anything; he has not changed, the political universe has pivoted around him. if this sounds more like a pathology than a noble stand on the bedrock of principle, you'd be half-right. the fact that he custom-coded robert spencer's blog, had his own warblog space on david horowitz's frontpagemag website, and had the same role in creating pamela gellar's blogging career as pygmalian had in creating galatea provides him ample basis for his narcicistic delusions, though he would now have it that his association with these figures was passive and removed.
there are many explanations for charles' change, but two are more plausible than the others. the nasty explanation is that charles attempted to parlay his influence on pamela gellar into a romantic engagement with her, but was rebuffed. it's an ugly speculation, but one that satisfies the indisputable fact of his continuing obcession with her. if true, however, gellar has been reticent to use it against charles.
a better explanation is that charles is the sort of authoritarian personality john dean warned us of. it would be comforting to imagine that people who renounce all past associations and ideals and pledge allegiance to their opposing counterparts are utterly devoid of permanent principles. this is seldom true, however. in looking at charles' career past and present we can see one thing that is consistent: charles hates the domestic opponents of the standing u.s. president. that is what animates him. his ideology is "presidentist" if there is such a thing. it was that way when bush was in office, it is that way now that obama is in office, and charles will jealously persecute the domestic enemies of the 45th president of the united states, regardless of his party.

additional links documenting charles johnson's racism:
http://wristaction.blogspot.com/2010/10/charles-on-juan-williams-incitement.html
http://wristaction.blogspot.com/2010/08/ive-written-about-charles-johnson.html
http://wristaction.blogspot.com/2010/10/charles-at-al-guardian.html
http://wristaction.blogspot.com/2010/04/charles-johnsons-obama-derangement.html

and since it is mentioned there, here is a link to and the full text of the post in which he defends ann coulter's "perfected jews" remarks, in case it ends up in the memory hole:

Coulter Shocka Video
Charles Johnson
Fri Oct 12, 2007 at 4:25 pm PDT • Views: 114

Several readers emailed the link to this Liveleak video of Ann Coulter’s appearance on the Donny Deutsch show.

I know some of you are slapping your foreheads and screaming, “Why? Dear Lord, why? Don’t hurt us, Charles!”

But since there were so many strong opinions about this one (mostly from people who didn’t actually see the interview), I think there’s some value to be had from going to the source, so we’re all talking about the same thing.

My opinion hasn’t changed: she was winding up Deutsch, and all it took was a straightforward statement about Christian doctrine. To call this “antisemitic” is beyond ludicrous, and it’s almost comical to watch Deutsch do his best to twist and spin Coulter’s words, working himself up into a lather and comparing Coulter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(video clip)

Postscript: Dennis Prager discussed this incident on his radio show this morning, and his take on it was very similar to mine: it’s another case of anti-conservative hysteria, drummed up by organizations like Media Matters, and very much a tempest in a teapot. (And Dennis pointed out that Ann Coulter has always been a strong supporter of Israel, which is quite true.)

P.S.: charles' new company believes that palestine, with it's dual struggle against israeli brutality and u.s. oppression, is the beacon forward for egyptian democracy.

P.S.: another one for the "i was never wrong" department:

When the story was in the news, there was nothing wrong with covering it at LGF. But you'll notice I didn't jump on board with the attempt to blow the incident up into something more.

charles' smug pose re: wmd hindsight

2011-02-03T05:16:00.001-05:00

geez. when did charles get hip to the "no wmds in iraq" scoop?

not prior to 2008 at least:

JPost: US-Israeli Report Shows Saddam Transferred WMDs to Syria

certainly not before 2006:

500 Sarin, Mustard Gas Shells Confirmed in Iraq

Oh, by the way … there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

to put that in perspective, charles was towing the wmd line as far as three years after the duelfer report. he was still promoting the testimony of iraqi air force general gorges sada that saddam trucked his wmd stocks into syria on the eve of the war. his final word on the matter was that it was nobody's fault. everybody believed that saddam had active wmd capabilities, and it's a "myth" that the people who promoted the threat of saddam's wmd capability were advancing known falsehoods.

but recently charles has struck the "we always knew that saddam had no wmds" tone of his prospective peer group:

Disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller ... played a huge role in promoting fictions about Iraq’s WMD capabilities...

even mohammed elbaredei gets the benefit of charles' hindsight.

I will give ElBaradei credit for being completely right about Iraq not having WMDs, though.

apparently charles thinks his credit is worth something. lets run those back to back again:

october 2008

He actually seems surprised to discover that nations like Iran and Saddam-era Iraq would try to hide their nuclear programs. Say it ain’t so, Mohamed!

february 2011

I will give ElBaradei credit for being completely right about Iraq not having WMDs, though.

the thing to remember about this tone of "we always knew saddam had no wmds" the left enjoys congratulating themselves for is that it too is a fiction of hindsight. prior to the invasion, the left didn't claim to know any such thing. their preferred line was "we know saddam has wmds because reagan gave them to him."

charles exposed manipulating his site stats: "not a bug, a feature! er, i mean only a bug."

2011-01-30T00:37:00.005-05:00

"my attack piece on you has 21600 page views. that's ~~21600~~ ~~2400~~ ~~200~~ obdicut, gus, me and a couple others laughing at you, buddy. pwned!"

it started when he banned all of the spiders from legitimate site-stat tracking outfits from counting his site. then he built his own damn site-stat counters. i don't even know what his claimed reason for this was, and i'm not going to bother looking it up, but i'm sure it was something along the lines of that they were slowing his site down and produced "inaccurate" results. the real reason might have been that the precipitous drop in his site's global ranking was too accurately reflected in the mainstream stat counters.

at some point (again, i'm not bothering with looking it up) he announced a revelation. why should his site's stat-counter count the main page only once? after all, you have all of those headlines displayed there, and each headline is an individual item of content which is one click away from being it's own pageview. why not just assume those pageviews and increment each view main page by the number of articles listed on the main page. by this feat of innovation, charles artificially inflated his stats by a factor of twelve. if this reasoning were applied to hospital billing, it would be prosecuted as insurance fraud. in charles' cloister of assent, it was a technical innovation worth bragging about.

recently, the manipulation has proven to go further. chenzen proved that, in ie, the most widely-used browser, each load of an individual article increments the pageview stats by nine for no apparent reason. so, we have an artificial inflation of lgf's site statistics by a factor of over 20%. that's kinda greedy.

when this became known, charles' initial response was to overtly accuse chenzen of fabricating the evidence. when too many of his cult members confirmed the phenomena, he came back and claimed to have discovered a "bug" in some third-party software. we're not expecting him to retract his initial smear, of course, and, since sewing bad faith results in a harvest of bad faith, we may as well assume that the "bug" was as deliberate as his earlier, overt method of inflating his site stats.

what makes this whole thing particularly suiting of charles is that charles has used his inflated site stats, clownishly, as some sort of "in your face, sucka" play against opponents, as we see in the above-linked tweet at paterico.

and this is to say nothing of what this means with regard to the advertising clients he's stealing from.

the violent rhetoric narrative

2011-01-18T03:44:00.001-05:00

progenitors of the violent rhetoric narrative are now protesting that no one of note ever said that sarah palin's crosshairs map was directly responsible for the murder in tuscon, only that sarah palin's crosshairs map was part of the atmosphere in which the tuscon murder happened, and so the two unlinked matters are appropriately discussed in juxtaposition with one another.

weasel words to the rescue, i guess. even if we are to accept that this is a distinction worth considering, the "atmospheric voodoo" version proceeded from the "directly caused" version, and so it is the fruit of a poisoned tree. and as the quality of fruit goes, it is unfit as pigslop.

there is no there there.

1) there is no "rising tide" of rightwing violence. of the dozens of incidents prejudged as examples of rightwing violence, two have turned out to have been committed by genuine sympathisers of the right. of the last three, two have had leftwing sympathies.

2) there is nothing in the rhetoric of the current era which couldn't be matched and surpassed by examples of leftwing rhetoric from the previous administration. leftwing derangement persists even into the current era.

3) it's hard to take seriously concerns about violent political rhetoric from the left who jealously defends and lionizes it's own militants and assasins.

4) there is much evidence that this was a canned narrative in desperate search of a canvas.

there is nothing to discuss of this "violent rhetoric". it is only horseshit all the way through to the other side. the entire discussion is an example of the left's anti-pluralism.

alter whitewashes leftwing asassins:

so, alter is a hack of course. and a liar.

zangara was not a nut who believed the president was “causing” his stomach pain by supernatural means. he was a shallow, self-pitying man who believed that because he had to suffer a chronic ailment, “capitalists” must be made to share the suffering.

here’s the quote leftists attempt to spin into the schizo whitewash:

“I decide to kill him and make him suffer. I want to make it 50-50. Since my stomach hurt I want to make even with capitalists by kill the President. My stomach hurt long time.”

he was a lone gunaman, for sure, but also one with known and outspoken anarcho-left sympathies.

also, i’m certian there is one from these past days, but have you ever seen a more strenuous attempt to avoid mentioning lee harvey oswald’s politics in an article about asassins?

the gabrielle giffords shooting

2011-01-11T14:38:00.000-05:00

i'm compelled to write something about the giffords shooting, but i can't rationalize the time that would be spent on it. you'll note that the "motto" of this blog is "always a bridesmade, never a blogger". this blog is meant to be more of a repository for blog-reading marginalia than a proper blog. the sort of full, meme-by-meme, heavily-cited, book-length refutation which would be required to fully respond to the sickening goulishness of the progressive movement in the wake of the shooting comprises a workload beyond what i'm willing to undertake.

i'm reluctant to fall back on the easy out of reducing my focus to what charles at lgf has to say about all of this, although it might be considered worthy to note that opportunistic deletions are once again considered to be full of telling ethical content there (although, some sites are suspiciously not being scrutinized in this fashion). also, charles has floated just about every fake facebook page, voter registration claim, moby comment, and false report since the incident and has retracted none of these as they've been debunked. he's even come up with his own inventions, by claiming that jim hoft "lied" about speaking directly to a dnc strategist as a source for a "conspiracy theory" that progressives designed to exploit the tragedy, when hoft, plain as black on white text, sourced the statement to a dnc strategist speaking to politico, with a link and enclosed in a blockquote.

charles' proof that the shooter is "rightwing" - proof which seems to escape most people viewing the same evidence - consists of bald assertion. it provokes one to recall the exception he made for the discovery channel hostage taker, who's act was explicitly political, but for whom, according to charles, "In this case, the only clear motivation is lunacy." i'll let you link over there and read charles' take for yourself, but let me quote the rule as i extrapolated it:

a violent incident which can be in any way twisted into a narrative about rightwing incitement and extremism will be twisted into a narrative about rightwing incitement and extremism. if the perpetrator appears to be more progressive than not, he was a lone nut committing a completely apolitical act of tragic nuttiness. and shame on you for trying to politisize it.

and here's the rule in action, courtesy of top-commenter, jimmah:

Wingnuts are trying to trying to say that since Loughner is mentally ill his actions had nothing to do with anything that was ever said anywhere.

Does the fact that he is mentally ill mean that we can be sure he wasn't influenced by violent tea party rhetoric? I don't see any reason for supposing that. An atmosphere of hate will be breathed by the sane and insane alike.

i wish it wasn't so easy, yet futile, given the ready availability of counter-examples like the one of the discovery hostage guy. the message, though is impermeable and preeminent. it is such that i had to struggle for an hour to remember the most recent previous violent incident, the florida school board shooter, clay duke, because, in keeping with the narrative machine of the left, his motives were said to be clouded in "mystery", though, indeed because, his politics were clearly and unambiguously of the left.

and so i'll close by reposting something i left on facebook:

it's easy to forget the last tragic lone gunman rampage, the guy who shot up the school board meeting in florida, because he left behind a suggested reading and viewing list of apocalyptic rhetoric from progressive sources, and so it was un...tenable to hang the "teabagger terrorist" frame on him. we quickly moved away from it. in this case, there is zero link between the arizona shooter and either palin or the tea parties, so interested parties have dug deep into their asses and pulled out this "crosshars" map. oddly enough, the martial rhetoric of
"targetting" opponents in political races is practiced by progressives as well; for instance by the democrat leadership committee (link) and the democrat congressional campaign committee (link) as well as individual progressive democrat candidates in their campaign ads (link) and even fervent pushers of the meme, like the progressive website dailykos, which scrambled yesterday to delete a post, written two days ago, which suggested that the congresswoman is "dead" and should be "eliminated" for the crime of being a mere "dino" dkos had it's own list of "targetted "dinos" for primary race elimination on which the congresswoman was featured.

so, let's not let our imaginations go wild.

P.S.:this silly lady has apparently forgotten the schooling she got on this same subject a while back:

ownage and winnage

2011-01-03T14:10:00.001-05:00

congrats are in order for Chen Zen for provoking Charles to such depths of impotent pettiness.

charles: "i was wrong"

2010-11-04T23:52:00.005-04:00

you know, it's unfortunate that charles was so invested in the "i haven't changed and i was never wrong" narrative in the year since his break from the right, because this is all any reasonable observer expected of him:

I admit that after 9/11 I wasn’t concerned at all with the human rights of the people who attacked us. I made light of the waterboarding issue, using the rationalization that it didn’t cause permanent physical harm and therefore couldn’t be classified as torture.

I now realize I was mistaken.

...

You may think the use of torture can be justified in some extreme cases (I don’t), and that, at least, is an arguable position. Wrong, but arguable.

in fact, i don't see any need to do my usual link roundup. suffice it to say that johnson's treatment of the torture issue was crass. it's just too bad that this came now, years too late to have mattered, and of course almost a year after he began abusing former friends for not seeing the light that went on in his head when he did. as i said about his belated statement about global warming:

thinking people can at times change their minds. someone who changes his mind and then immediately begins insulting the people whom he just parted with for their lack of enlightenment is an asshole. the asshole who lets nine months go by before deigning to explain the thought process behind his conversion is an insecure asshole.

the post has an interesting title, "Changelog: On Torture", which appears to suggest it is the first of a recurring type. perhaps soon we can expect to see "Changelog: On Paranoid Hyper-Vigilance Against Sharia Law". we'll see.

in the meantime, charles' display of candor is probably less an example of him seeing the light than an example of him seeing that his ass is showing, as it is apparent to even charles' most jealous loyalists:

586 Reginald Perrin
11/04/2010 5:13:24 pm PDT

I understand why Charles posted this today. There is a problem with the LGF Wiki page.

yea there is. (link) but, though charles is over at wikipedia blanking the article about his blog to keep the "memory hole" material out of it he assures us...

599 Charles
11/04/2010 5:24:49 pm PDT

re: #595 Reginald Perrin

I was referring to the person with multiple IP numbers who is making an issue out of missing posts. The claim that you are trying to cover-up you past positions on certain "sticky" issues. An sincere honest admiration such as today's, kills that argument.

Yeah, I see how you're looking at it -- but honestly, that couldn't have been farther from my mind when I wrote this post.

what an honorable guy.

UPDATE: apparently we'll have to wait a bit for charles to apply his newfound integrity and candor to the writing of a sharia-themed "Changelog" post.

UPDATE: ...or one on anti-latino racism, judging from today's post.

charles can't ban wikipedia.

2010-10-26T03:05:00.003-04:00

this is so pathetic you might weep.

last week on the 17th of october at 2:24am, an ip which resolves to a server in albequerqe, new mexico, visited the wikipedia article about lgf and blanked the entire section regarding charles' revisionist deletions of islamophobic material from his site.

it was swiftly restored.

then, a couple days later, on the 19th at 8:27pm, another unregistered user with an ip which resolves to los angeles california put the following on the talk page of the first unregistered user:

I'm curious to know if Wikipedia editors plan to go through every blogger's old posts to see what they deleted or altered?

If not, why is this section in the article about Little Green Footballs?

then he waited for about an hour, apparently expecting the honchos at wikipedia to take notice of something left on the talk page of an unregistered user. disappointed in the lack of response, the los angeles ip re-posted his concerns under the relevant section of the talk page for the lgf article.

then, inexplicably, charles enters our story, leaving this comment at his site:

315 Charles
10/19/2010 1:28:56 pm PDT

I just posted this comment in the 'Talk' section of Wikipedia's article on LGF, because someone added the stupid stalker talking points about me deleting and altering old posts:

I'm curious to know if Wikipedia editors plan to go through every blogger's old posts to see what they deleted or altered?

If not, why is this section in the article about Little Green Footballs?

but that's not the bottom of it. when charles' minions fail to take the hint that they're supposed to flash-mob over to wikipedia and defend his wounded honor, he then tries to entice them with the promise of sweet, sweet "wingnut" flesh...

378 Charles
10/19/2010 2:00:04 pm PDT
There's quite a battle going on over the LGF page at Wikipedia. Right wing nuts are doing everything they can to get negative items posted.

[Link: en.wikipedia.org...]

of course, it's only a "battle" in the hearstian sense, considering that the talk thread had been dead for more than a month before charles came to it, and his addition to the thread has inspired no replies whatsoever as of a week since.

in any case, this hint stirs some of charles' users. one suggests they perhaps draft a section about "stalkers". charles likes the idea, but demures...

402 Charles
10/19/2010 2:17:18 pm PDT

re: #398 Reginald Perrin

Charles, do you think it is time to consider a chapter at Wiki about the serial stalker trolls?

I don't think it would be appropriate for me to add that, but if someone else wants to, I think it would be a great idea.

...because, naturally, it would be a breech of ethics for charles to edit the wikipedia article about himself to remove facts detailing his ethical breeches. best to leave that sort of thing to unregistered users with ip numbers which resolve to albuquerque, new mexico.

the frustration charles feels about this is palpable; frustration that his "minions" are too lazy to run to his aid, frustration that he can't cleanse wikipedia the way he can cleanse his own site and sites friendly to him. when a minion suggests, helpfully, that starting a beef outside of the fortress walls would only invite unwanted facts into the fray, putting charles and his enterprise at a disadvantage, charles lashes out and basically accuses him of being a troll:

432 Charles
10/19/2010 2:56:42 pm PDT

re: #429 sattv4u2

Not too converse on how Wki works, but iirc (as evidenced of what Charles is talking about) anyone (them) can go and add/ edit things

Why give them a forum?

Uh, no. It does NOT work to ignore this kind of crap.

And I can't help wondering why someone always pops up to try to get people to ignore it.

this was a great joy for me to observe. this is charles as lolcow. mind you, this comes in the same week charles petitioned archive.org to delete all of their lgf links.

charles on juan williams' "incitement against muslims"

2010-10-21T21:33:00.007-04:00

Juan Williams was fired in the wee hours this morning. some are attributing it to what he said. i don't take that view. an npr anchor can go on other networks and say a lot of zany stuff without repercussions from npr. williams' double career as a hard journalist and a pundit always did strike me as precarious. given the same scenario with the political poles reversed i could imagine the same eventual outcome.

in any case, here's what he said:

"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country," Williams said.

"But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they're identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

and of course charles has some stuff to say about that. so, lets get to it, shall we?

first off, here's how charles presents the incident:

...yesterday Bill O’Reilly, as part of the standard Fox News incitement against Muslims, prodded Williams into crossing a line.

so, since charles believes that williams "crossed the line" into "incitement against muslims," we can expect to find that charles' would never himself have said anything paranoid about flying on airplanes with muslims.

Why in the world would Americans be suspicious of Muslims loudly, publicly praying on airplanes? Go figure.

...never...

a highly disturbing must-read (and I stress, must-read) article for anyone who flies often...

Jacobsen recounts a white-knuckle flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, that she and her husband shared with a group of about 15 Middle Eastern men (they turned out to be Syrians) who were almost certainly (judging from her description) conducting a dry run for a repeat of September 11, with teams of hijackers prepared for passenger resistance.

...

We should not be too complacent about our ability to resist if we find ourselves in a hijack situation, oh lizardoids. As much as we admire the passengers of Flight 93, we must not underestimate the enemy’s ability to learn from their mistakes and exploit our weaknesses.

...ever...

And the imams are going to sue US Airways, of course. ...Kudos to US Airways for standing up to these blatant attempts to delegitimize genuine security concerns.

...ever...

The Syrian musicians who behaved in such a disturbing way aboard Annie Jacobsen’s now-famous Northwest Airlines flight that they were pulled aside and screened by FBI and immigration after landing, were traveling with expired visas—and not one of the investigators even thought to look at the dates.

in fact charles is so without qualm about sharing a passenger cabin with muslims (or musicians who happen to be syrian) that he spent none of his precious blogging time championing the "john doe" law, a law which would provide immunity from civil action to private citizens who might be too quick to pull the brake-chord and call the dhs on any swarthy "terrorist"-looking types that are flying with them (link).

and of course, the "john doe" law was devised to put the power of racial profiling, which is illegal for enforcement and investigatory officials to practice, into the hands of the citizenry. not that charles has ever really had a problem with racially profiling muslims...

The Horror of Profiling

The horror of racial profiling has even reached the idyllic Middle Eastern paradise of Lebanon. I blame Bush.

Inviting the Fox into the Henhouse

In the Netherlands, “disadvantaged Moroccan youth” are being given a fast track to become airport workers.

CAIR and the ACLU On the Attack

The radical Islamic front group calling itself CAIR is seething again, and joining forces with the ACLU: U.S. family says racially profiled at NY airport.

Poll: Americans Back Profiling

It’s taken five years, but the US public is beginning to rebel against the pointless random security measures forced down its throat by special interest groups.

Islamic Grievance Theater Goes to Film

The big push is on to force, coerce, and cajole Americans to go back to sleep, forget all about those not-so-bad 9/11 attacks, and stop paying any special attention to Muslims on airplanes. And they’re using the language of “human rights” to do it.

ah, but charles wants it both ways you see. he doesn't want to be seen as supporting what juan williams said, but he also doesn't want to be seen assailing juan williams, either. and so, despite having tagged each post he's written on it today with "anti-muslim" and said that williams' comments "cross the line" into "incitement against muslems," he declares:

here’s the thing: I don’t believe Juan Williams is an “extremist Islamophobic nutjob.” In fact, in some ways Williams was giving voice to a fear and prejudice that many Americans share.

the best explanation i can come up with for this double-talk is that he's protecting the solidity of his new position that all things dealing with islamism are crazy wingnut extremism from the right. juan williams cannot be so perfunctorily wedged into that pigeon-hole, and any attempt on charles' part would compromise the whole structure of the pigeon-hole itself. also, his nemesis of choice, r.s. mccain, dared him to label williams so, and charles is essentially a child.

charles instead tries to transfer most of the rhetorical weight of his denunciation of williams' remarks onto bill o'reilly and fox news in general:

Fox, of course, is going to work the angle to death that Williams was “speaking truth” to the NPR libruls.

In the context of everything else going on with Fox News, these statements were incredibly irresponsible,...

Williams’s remarks contributed to the constant drumbeat of Fox News incitement against Muslims, essentially reassuring Bill O’Reilly that his prejudice was understandable and justified.

and that is as good a cue as any to examine the thing bill o'reilly said which charles regards as actual, apparent "incitement against muslims". the discussion williams was participating in when he said the things which got him fired was about an incident from a week ago when o'reilly appeared as a guest on the view. when asked to explain why he believed it was inappropriate to construct a mosque at ground zero, o'reilly responded that "Muslims killed us on 9/11."

that's it. that's the thing that charles considers to be beyond the pale of permissible discourse. as you might imagine, it wasn't always so for charles:

CAIR Pressuring Schools to Whitewash 9/11

the Council on American Islamic Relations is applying pressure to schools to whitewash the history of the September 11 attacks, and remove all context that connects the atrocities to Islam.

9/11 Whitewash Watch

Here are just two from the seemingly endless flood of articles intended to reassure the American public that Islam is a Religion of Peace™ (and that anyone with a different opinion is a bigoted Islamophobic knuckle-dragger), as the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities approaches.

of course charles' equation of all muslims with terrorism has not often been so subtle. his derisive moniker for islam, "the religion of peace", is most often shortened to simply RoP for quick-draw acidic juxtaposition with one terrorist incident or another. sometimes it's elongated into "the religion of beheadings" or the Religion of Misogyny, Religion of Mass Murder, Religion of Market Bombs, Religion of Masks and Rifles, Religion of Children with Weapons, Religion of Revenge, Religion of Suicide Car Bombs, etc.. you begin to suspect he's got a point he's trying to drive home. then he throws you for a loop and describes islam simply as a "Cult of Blood and Death". if you didn't catch his frontal assertions, he gets clever with it:

Non-Buddhist Arrested with Suicide Note
Last Wednesday a man was arrested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport with a suicide note and jihad materials.

Oddly enough, he does not appear to be a Buddhist.

American forces in Iraq have captured six people who claim to be American citizens and two who claim to be Brits; they’re being held on suspicion of involvement in jihad activities against coalition soldiers.

Must be those pesky Presbyterians acting up again.

An influential ~~Presbyterian minister~~ Shi’ite Muslim cleric in Iran has issued a fatwa that says any Jew who buys Iraqi land should be ~~mildly chastised~~ killed.

At a public hearing in New Orleans, a man named Salaam Jihad (possibly a Buddhist?) threatened to walk into a police station and “open fire on everyone”—and members of the audience applauded

Probably Those Buddhist Extremists Again

but of course all of that is forgotten. as the most current truth has it, charles was never the lead retailer of populist islamophobic prejudice. and that is why he is able to thoughtfully delve deeper and pose the questions which lie at the heart of this whole unfortunate incident:

in some ways Williams was giving voice to a fear and prejudice that many Americans share. But is that the behavior of a responsible journalist — to echo populist prejudices back to the masses?

you see? sort of like a jerry springer "closing thought" in it's depth and sensitivity.

oh, wait... didn't charles once argue that mainstream journalists were irresponsible shills because they didn't echo charles' brand of populist islamophobic prejudice? yea, i think he did:

Society of Professional Journalists Advocates Whitewashing Islam

If you’ve wondered why so many mainstream media stories about Islamic issues omit important details and draw spurious morally equivalent conclusions, wonder no more. They’re doing it on purpose.

Questions That Never Get Asked

It’s just pathetic that the news organizations of America absolutely never ask so-called “moderates” like Al-Husainy substantive, tough questions. Any LGF lizard could come up with a similar list, and the “moderates” would have no answers.

And I suspect that’s exactly why the questions don’t get asked.

lizards go back to election night 2008

2010-10-18T01:52:00.001-04:00

SanFransiscoZionist looks back at election night 2008 at lgf and does some quoting. it's worth a read; especially for a shot of Kilgore Trout and reine.de.tout trading crypto-racist gags about jerimiah wright.

the quick take on that excursion:

526 SanFranciscoZionist
Sun, Oct 17, 2010 1:19:08am

BTW, for McCain voting lizards, this is not a gloating exercise--I'm just checking back to see if my memory of how fired up and odd-sounding people were at the time is accurate, and reporting back random snippets 'cause it's 1:18 in the morning.

I can stop anytime.

I wouldn't worry, SFZ. all have been banned.

somewhere downthread, Dark Falcon thinks he's observed something...

592 Dark_Falcon
Sun, Oct 17, 2010 7:31:11am

re: #544 SanFranciscoZionist

I must say "Thank You" to SFZ, for taking the Stalkers' "memory hole" meme and throwing back in their face. It's a real thing of beauty.

...uhh, ...

594 Obdicut
Sun, Oct 17, 2010 7:32:42am

re: #592 Dark_Falcon

Where she'd do that?

...exactly.

in fact, the only further response from lgf on the whole memory hole issue has been for charles to completely block archive.org from archiving his site.

charles at "al-guardian"

2010-10-16T01:55:00.002-04:00

i genuinely wouldn't have expected charles to leave his fortress of assent since it was discovered that he had been deleting posts which evidence his paranoid islamophobic bigotry.

equally surprising to find the guardian giving him space, as he has had quite a few nasty things to say about the guardian, none of which he's publicly reconsidered:

"Guardian: Never Met a Jewkiller They Didn't Like"

"...the antisemitic, anti-American Guardian newspaper..."

"Al-Guardian: Don't Fear Shari'a
"Osama Saeed is a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, and in today’s al-Guardian he argues that the West should not fear the coming dominance of Islam. ...this astounding example of mainstream media dhimmitude"

etc.

this odd confluence means either charles johnson is an antisemite or the guardian is islamophobic. or both and the reverse simultaneously, i think. i guess that's what the calculus of canned outrage and guilt by association nets you.

some johnson lies:

Please note: that "LGF Dictionary" was not written by me, and I did not agree with everything in it. In fact, I deleted it from my site, after briefly hosting it when the original host was hacked, for exactly that reason.

They're trying to smear me with it now, of course, but the facts are: I didn't write it, didn't approve of it, and deleted it from my site after hosting it for a very short time.

the truth:

johnson hosted the lgf dictionary until this past year when the blog WizzBang began embarrassing him with it's contents. (link) charles deleted the dictionary from his site subsequently as a direct response to this exposure (link). the version of the lgf dictionary WizzBang was referencing was the version charles had installed as a permanent sidebar feature on his blog.

so, if it is possible not to choke on the claim that it is somehow unfair to attribute his approval to something he published, it must be impossible in light of the fact that he had the item installed as a permanent feature on his blog's sidebar. the claim that he hosted the item only "briefly" is a plain lie. the suggestion that he deleted the item in service of his disapproval of its contents is also not true. it is clear that he deleted the item because it could be used to illustrate his hypocrisy and past tolerance for what he contemporaneously condemned as bigotry and racism.

charles also deleted a blog item post announcing it's creation (link to archive.org copy). here is the text charles johnson wrote to accompany it:

LGF operative zombie gets all etymological with it, and compiles a list of LGF-oriented blog jargon:

sounds loaded with apprehension and qualifications don't it? there is also no mention of it being endangered by a hackers, much less such a thing as a compelling reason to host it. he simply accepted it and approved of it, and was clearly amused by it, as a piece of the culture growing around his site.

some of the words charles stamped his approval upon were "koranimal" and "oil ticks". the former is clearly bigoted. the latter charles attempts a nuanced defense of, claiming the term isn't a reference to all arabs, but only the ones who profit from the sale of oil. this is similar to an anti-black racist claiming that, when he uses the n-word, he doesn't mean all black people; just the ones you see in rap videos.

either way you have it, charles contention that he never approved of the lgf dictionary, that he hosted it only briefly and deleted it long ago because its content was at odds with his sincerely-held values is a lie in every aspect.

another johnson lie is that he had always been vocal about his disapproval of the term, "st. pancake". i don't see how he can float that one with a link to his approving synthesis of the term into a joke staring him in the face. nevertheless, johnson's supposedly eternal disapproval of the term first manifested itself in 2009.

johnson, like his loyalists, seems to have adopted a bizarre heuristic schema in which the blockquote html tag is a lead wall of insulation from association with what is collected within and intent remains ambiguous so long as it isn't fastened down with "bad words" used in first-person infinitive voice. take, for example, charles' defense of his st. pancake post above. charles didn't "quote" someone using the term as a pejorative. he synthesized a joke from it. that is using the term. in fact, it is using the term in a way which shares in and furthers it's most objectionable contents.

yet charles thinks the book is still open on that one:

please show me where in that article I used the term "St. Pancake."

so, here's were we come back to charles' heuristic challenge of "if a black man is lynched in the woods and nobody shouts the n'word, was any of it racist?"

in answer, i'll repeat what i said above: is charles innocent of the bigotry he accuses spenser and gellar of because he never used the specific words "nuke the kabbah" or any of the assorted ethnic slurs he allowed on his site until 1-20-2008? here's a clue: neither has robert spenser. in fact, robert spenser was way out ahead of charles in telling his commenters to cool it with the hate speech (link).

spenser's views were bigoted in substance; charles' postings, moreso.

buy gold!

2010-09-28T06:55:00.002-04:00

sorry, i know there are other, better lgf stories to tell, like the one about the other three-dozen memory hole posts which have been discovered, but i couldn't pass this one up.

here's charles' scoop:

WashingtonDCHotels Reports Colbert-Stewart DC Rallies Outpacing Beck

...booking demand for hotel rooms in Washington DC for Steven Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" and John Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" rallies scheduled for October 30th is outpacing Glenn Beck's
"Restoring Honor Rally" for the same comparative period.

According to Gerri Smyth, Washington DC Hotel's Director of Reservations, booking demand for comparative periods show about a 25% higher demand with less than 6 weeks to go.

and here's charles' source:

PRBuzz
Press Release Newswire

...

Gerri Smyth, Director of Reservations
Washington DC Hotels

that's pretty damned pathetic. it may have even been a paid placement for him.

charles johnson of lgf now deleting posts which evidence his paranoid islamophobic bigotry

2010-09-13T03:34:00.009-04:00

when tim blair used charles johnson's site archives to demonstrate the erratic and capricious nature of charles' precipitous u-turn from believing that obama was a "seekrit muslem" and an anti-white racist, mobbed up with anti-semites and communist terrorists, to shrieking "racist!" at anyone who didn't get on the obama train when he did (unexpectedly and without explanation), charles responded by mocking blair as an ersatz "investigative reporter".

How did Blair discover this amazing amount of heretofore unknown evidence that I’ve changed my mind about Obama? Did he scour the web for deleted posts, diligently searching Google’s cache and the Internet Archive?

Well, actually, no. He searched LGF, using the search tool I programmed, and found a whole lot of posts written by me, all of which are still posted publicly. He must have spent hours finding things that aren’t hidden. Good work, fearless investigator!

despite the shitty smugness of this evasive and dishonest reply, it would appear that charles is cognizant that his past ravings substantively undermine his standing in these matters, and so he has begun stuffing old posts of his down the memory hole.

and this practice also extends to editing paranoid and bigoted remarks from posts which are left standing...

(the throbbing lgf post)

...all without a peep of acknowledgment.

charles wasn't just a hypocrit when he dodged tim blair's post by patting himself on the back for his falsely-claimed transparency. he was also kind of a liar, too.

it's something to think about when he claims his anti-jihadism was in substance different from the sort he labels "bigotry" today. it's certain that he's deleting the posts which would tell otherwise.

UPDATE: another post goes down the memory hole:

today charles posted this...

American Family Association Spokesman Fischer: Muslims Are Inbred

...with the tags, "Bad Craziness", "Xenophobia", "Paranoia", "Extremism", and "Hate Speech".

but again we see that charles was way out on the cutting edge of paranoid, extremist hate speech with a very similar story of his concern that inbreeding makes muslims who they are:

British MP: Ban Inbreeding Before It's Too Late

...which charles breathlessly promotes:

Mind-blowing statistics on the horrible effects of Muslim inbreeding in Britain,

but to click on that item, one finds themselves redirected to lgf's front page. like his raving, paranoid bigotry about the flight 93 memorial, charles has "unhappened" this post as well. yesterday's "truth" has been cleared away so it cannot contradict today's "truth".

this is now a pattern. it would seem that the best reading companions for lgf going forward will be google's cache and archive.org.

(link to google's cache)
(screenshot of google's cache)

here's one he missed in his purge:

It's Sad When Cousins Marry

Saudi Arabia Awakes to the Perils of Inbreeding

[blockquote from new york times article snipped]

God’s will? Or the inevitable result of a backward, theocratic culture?

(screenshot, just in case.)

thanks to Weasel Zippers for the link!

also thanks to Ace of Spades HQ for their link!

UPDATE (10/17/10): charles has now blocked archive.org's from archiving his page. (link).

also, earlier this month, another three-dozen memory-holed posts have been discovered.

the memory hole has opened

2010-09-09T20:03:00.012-04:00

SUMMARIZED HERE, with thanks to TIM BLAIR for the link.

scroll down for the BIG UPDATE

- first charles dumped the cox and forkum masthead, which depicted a "hippie" leaping into the arms of a masked hamas soldier to avoid a bouncing green football.

- then he disappeared the "lgf dictionary," which included charming terms such as "oil tic," "splodeydope," "car swarm," "koranimal," "RoP," "saint pancake" and a definition of "racism" which suggested that racism is an imaginary phenomenon which liberals invoke when they are losing an argument.

- then he banned everyone he had spent six years hat-tipping

- then he went back and deleted the comments. tens of thousands.

- recently, it would appear that he has removed "nekama's troll hammer" from his site.

- then he adopted a policy of delete/banning anyone who quoted his past statements back to him.

and now it's finally happening. charles is now deleting his old threads.

there's no way to demonstrate this in a screenshot, and i never took a screen shot of the original item, so here's a proof you can try out at home.

1) go to lgf
2) on the left side bar, find the google search box
3) type in the word, "islamofascist" and hit enter
4) the very top result will be Flight 93 Memorial Still an Islamofascist Shrine
5) click on it.

you will be redirected to the front page of lgf. because it's no longer there. because he deleted it. because, when he proclaims, i have never spoke such paranoid bigotry his own site archive shows him up as a liar. so his site archive must be cleansed.

i've pointed to this item before in reference to charles' current stance toward the "ground zero mosque"...

Flight 93 Memorial Still an Islamofascist Shrine

...in this post of my own:

of charles and "pure idiocy" about crescent-shaped designs

as it turns out, every link in that post to one of charles' posts regarding the flight 93 memorial is dead now. so here's a screenshot to show that google's spiders, with their indifferent eyes, have recorded charles' deceit.

as much as i'd like to take credit for provoking charles to unhappen these posts, i'm afraid there's a better explanation. you might notice something about that screenshot. the top result for "flight 93" at lgf is a "pages" post by minion, avanti:

Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial ??

it begins, ...

When will everyone start laughing at these idiots?

...evidently not realizing that the joke is on her.

on the up-side, it may be that charles is preparing the way to "hat tip" avanti's post, add some pithy commentary of his own, and beclown himself in the process. all with the delusional presumption that since no one left commenting on his site would dare bring this stuff up, that his credibility can be secured with some hasty deletions.

here are the archive.org copies of a couple of those posts:

Flight 93 Memorial Still an Islamofascist Shrine

Flight 93 Memorial Project Unchanged, Comments Now Open

and, while we're at it, Nekama's Troll Hammer

UPDATE: charles is also now editing old posts without acknowledging the changes.

i've quoted charles in 2008 referring to imam feisal abdul rauf as an "islamic supremacist"...

"...it’s no surprise to find them promoting yet another Islamic supremacist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, arguing in favor of bringing the medieval code of sharia law to Britain."

well, he allowed a minion to question him about it here. there's a link back to the old post i quoted from. what does it say now?

...it’s no surprise to find them promoting Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, arguing in favor of bringing the medieval code of sharia law to Britain.

and so now, purely for the laughs, i present:

the throbbing lgf post

(a little disclaimer is appropriate here. i hadn't thought to grab a screenshot of the post before charles changed it, so the "before" half of the throbbing gif is a composite. it does reflect the actual text of charles' post as i quoted it some months ago. charles could claim otherwise of course. one pretty much expects him to at this point.)

charles johnson inspires violent hostage stand-off

2010-09-02T23:00:00.004-04:00

earlier, a deranged progressive strapped explosives to himself and held three people hostage in the building which headquarters the discovery channel. he left behind a manifesto which demanded that the discovery channel air environmentalist and pro-evolution programming.

per charles' own standard, charles' culpability in this act of domestic leftwing terrorism is undeniable:

7. ...Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!

charles is a strident public mouthpiece for evolution and environmentalism, and this act of terrorist violence inevitably followed. and yet he hasn't publicly taken responsibility for lee's act and disavowed environmentalism and evolution. has he no decency?

rather, he has proceeded with a two-point strategy;
1) apolitisize the incident
2) reserve the right to repolitisize the incident as right-wing on a contingency basis.

for the latter, he refers to a single item in lee's screed which refers to immigrants as "human polution". this is tanton-ite rhetoric, by which i refer to james tanton, father of the modern anti-immigration movement. the tricky thing about this is that james tanton was and is self-identified with progressive-ism. i know. tanton-founded groups like cis and fair are now more identified with the right. the historical left-situatedness of anti-immigration vitriol, from the days when ceasar chavez would organize violent union mobs at the border to beat immigrants with baseball bats and bicycle chains and environmentalists like tanton were arguing that the preservation of progressive social policies required zero imigration, is a fact i and others on the right have had trouble getting a receptive audience for. but the point is that, within the context of neo-malthusian environmentalism, anti-immigration rhetoric is very much a thing of the left.

but charles can have it his way if he wants. the thing to note here is that charles is "cherry-picking" something he would consider a "minor point", if the incident were one which charles was trying to frame as rightwing.

for instance, it was a "minor point" that the pentagon shooter was a registered democrat since long prior to his fatal shooting spree, which didn't perturb charles' narrative that he was somehow tied up with the conservative movement via ron paul. the fact that the pentagon shooter did not support ron paul in the 2008 election, but rather ron paul's lefty counterpart, mike gravel, never penetrated charles' certitude on the matter. the pentagon shooter's ample quoting of von mises certainly demonstrated that he was not altogether averse to market anarchism. however, i would imagine that bedel was the only one on the planet to apply von mises ideas to the creation of a weed-backed currency, which, alongside some exercised rhetoric about quantum computing, was the substance of the pentagon shooter's "ideology", such as it was. his actual motivation for the actual shooting was to act out a mission impossible scenareo to retrieve evidence relating to the "mysterious" death of a marine colonel; a theory which has more traction on lefty conspiracy sites, like michael constantine's, than on righty outfits like prisonplanet.

it was for all of these reasons that a reasonable observer might have refrained from hammering this triangular peg into either the square or round hole. charles, needless to say, was not that sort of reasonable observer:

Pentagon Shooter: Another Violent Anti-Government Loon?

The Pentagon Shooter's Extreme Right-Libertarian Beliefs

The Pentagon Shooter's Extreme Right-Libertarian Beliefs, Revisited

but, for the purposes of the present case of the environmentalist hostage-taker, charles demands special dispensation...

292 Charles
9/01/2010 4:26:04 pm PDT

By the way -- I'm not going to agree that all incidents like this are non-political. When that weirdo killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum in DC, that was a very clear case of violence motivated by extreme right wing ideology. And there are many other recent cases in which the motivation was very clear.

In this case, the only clear motivation is lunacy.

And it's not a "double standard" to say that. It's reality. It's an absurd and illogical simplification to say that because I won't assign this guy to the left wing, that means I'm promoting a double standard by assigning other cases to the right wing.

this is of course before anyone, in the "stalker" community or elsewhere, had bothered to see what charles' take on this might be. he rather seemed to be protesting to the thunderous beating of his own conscience. as if it could ever be said that charles is a hypocrite.

perish the thought, charles.

in any case, charles pleads his purity on the matter by citing his lack of political attribution in the case of the joseph stack kamikaze attack on an irs office...

204 Charles
9/01/2010 2:10:13 pm PDT

When that kook flew an airplane into a building in Las Vegas, I said he was a loon who couldn't be classified as right or left wing, and I'm saying the same thing about this guy. His "manifesto" isn't like any kind of left wing ideology, it's just crazy.

...and on this point charles is being technically, partially truthful. charles in fact generated only one post on the joseph stack attack. in it, he said:

Facebook Support for the Austin Anti-Government Lunatic

At Facebook, an eruption of support from the wingnut roots for Joe Stack, who flew an airplane into an Austin building this morning: Joseph Andrew Stack | Facebook.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but there you go.

the tone of this, of course, doesn't suggest agnosticism with regard to whether stack was a wingnut. later, when charles did his much more extensive coverage of the pentagon shooting, he led with the title, "Another Violent Anti-Government Loon?", but he could have been implicitly referring to anyone, since every conservative is now a potentially violent loon by charles' reconning. another thing to notice is that charles' first post about joseph stack came days after the attack and covered the facebook angle, as if he was keeping his powder dry until some binary political angle could be found. it was never acknowledged by anyone on the left who promoted this "joseph stack's teabagger facebook page" meme that the page itself appears to have been a hoax perpetrated by someone named "emily waters".

you might also notice that charles mis-remembers the site of the attack as "las vegas" and not austin, where it actually occurred. (las vegas was the site of a courtroom shooting which the left also immediately attributed to a "wingnut" "teabagger" before the facts emerged that he was a black man who believed the judge in his sosoc case was ruling against him based on hidden racist motives.) this is understandable, as charles was consumed with ~~bigger~~ equally important matters, such as the horrifying spectacle of the john birch society setting up a folding table and a vinyl banner on some patch of all-weather carpet in a hotel reception hall at the 2010 cpac - a scoop charles appeared to be certain would be his next rathergate. charles live-blogged every boring minute of cpac 2010 with a level of attention he never applied to, say, yearlykos. cpac started the day before the stack plane crash and the day after, charles had to make his first comments about it in the respectable spotlight of a bloggingheads diavlog opposite conn carrol. with the camera in his face and the prerogative to appear more reasonable than conn, who was evidently a moral monster for not refusing to cover cpac, charles hedged in a way he didn't feel necessary in his coverage of the pentagon shooting or, say, the sparkman ~~murder~~ suicide. charles, in the end never got a chance to revisit the joseph stack plane crash incident before it rolled ifar out of the news cycle, and was stuck with his "neither/nor/a little of both" statements. he is now trying to re-purpose these comments as some kind of evidence of reasonableness.

but the one other thing about the joseph stack incident which complicated the crafting of a neat aggregation of his attack on the irs building and the right, is that stack left behind a manifesto in which he positively identified himself with the left. his objects of scorn were private health care, the pharmaceutical companies, george bush, and the tax exempt status of the catholic church, which he defined as a reactionary force which harbors pedophiles. he chose as his epitaph, the communist creed, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." what's worse, is that progressives, especially those not invited to hash out a unified set of talking points at journolist, caught the joe stack message and expressed their affinity for it.

so, though charles would rather you didn't see it this way, it is evidenced that he operates on a doctrinal double standard: a violent incident which can be in any way twisted into a narrative about rightwing incitement and extremism will be twisted into a narrative about rightwing incitement and extremism. if the perpetrator appears to be more progressive than not, he was a lone nut committing a completely apolitical act of tragic nuttiness. and shame on you for trying to politisize it.

charles johnson: nevar a hypocrite.

PROTIP: attempts at equanimous discourse will get you flagged down at lgf.

charles johnson: not a stalker

2010-09-01T14:31:00.008-04:00

link

that's the twitter list charles set up so his minions can monitor her feed without giving her views.

in any case, breitbart is poking charles with a stick on twitter and was successful in provoking a response. though we can read breitbart's half of the conversation, charles in typical fashion, decided to take his conversation to private channels...

i'm guessing he isn't so much sparring with breitbart behind this screen of opacity, but maybe pleading his case to eric boelert.

ADDENDUM: i just wanted to jump in and note that charles is lying in his defense against the breitbart tweets about lgf being investigated for death threats and anti-arab/muslem hate crimes. charles removed the posts, but did not "immediately" ban anyone. charles didn't ban the commenters until the vlamms bellang thing in 2009. not because they crossed some moral line, but because they crossed him personally. at the time of the charges, charles actually defended the commenting community, saying that CAIR was attacking "free speech," and only deleted the specific messages for "looks".

totally not the same thing

2010-08-31T03:41:00.003-04:00

don't you see, it isn't charles who has changed. it is obama who has changed (for the better!)...

"...quoting Barack Obama’s own stories about his youthful attitudes toward race..."

"...Obama has clearly moved past those prejudices."

and, you see, charles was only quoting obama. because obama's exact words were, "Here’s a piece on Barack Obama’s ... shockingly racist anti-white attitudes."

charles downthread:

re: #75 keithgabryelski
Just to bring this all around ... Beck apologized for calling President Obama racist on FoxNews Sunday when we was asked about it (yesterday) by Chris Wallace.

Right, that's why I'm supposed to apologize too, or I'm a hypocrite. Or something.

never, charles.

OT: mandymanners has finally been banned.

obdicut

2010-08-24T06:20:00.002-04:00

okay, i'm back. i have to note that i didn't find obdicut's immediate reply inviting. it suggested obdurateness. hopefully i'm wrong about that.

in any case, i don't think it's a fair characterization of my comments here or elsewhere to say that "all (i) have are untestable hypotheticals," when i entered the thread with testable arguments backed up by links to johnson's statements.

on a sidenote, elbruce's comment perplexed me. i suppose he believed he found something mitigating in the rest of charles' claim that the nyt had finally come to agreement with him that obama is a "seekrit muslem". but the passage he quoted continues on to claim that obama, as a seekrit muslem, would not have to fear the same reprisals as other apostates supposedly must under islamic law, because islamic radicals would understand the strategic necessity of his apostasy. in other words, the part elbruce added reveals charles to be more paranoid and bigoted, not less. and it certainly doesn't undermine the demonstrated fact that charles full-throatedly promoted the notion that obama is a "seekrit muslem."

you asked me what cynical motives a liberal might have had for joining lgf. i'm not sure when you joined. just after the election? just after the inauguration? just prior? during the creationism flap or before that, during the vlamms bellang thing? at any point in that timeline, you must have come to lgf from somewhere and known something about lgf. perhaps not every ugly thing charles had said about liberals as a class or muslems as a class, but lgf was rather famous as a "nazi-esque hate-site" within the left of the blog-o-sphere. thus, the portrayal of charles as a man of moral and epistemic consistency is implausible. either you don't know lgf or charles and you've never been there or you know something of charles and lgf and you forgive him of his past as a raving, paranoid mccarthyite bigot based on an unprincipled exception.

there is one third explanation: you enter the lgf community with designs. at this point, it's clear that any effort to "concern troll" lgf into a left-o-sphere asset would have been moot in light of charles' willingness to become one, but that might have been a plausible motive 12 months ago. not the only one; one might assume any kind of trolling. in any case, i'm certain i don't need to explain this further as you are familiar with the current climate at lgf in which dissenters are immediately flamed with a variety of pejoratives for "troll" such as "concern troll," "sleeper," etc., by both the community and charles himself.

i once witnessed a commenter enter an agw thread and argue an anti-agw position without uttering so much as a four-letter word, even as his opponents assailed him with empty ad hominem ("wingnut" and the like. the prohibition against incivility only runs one way at lgf, you see). he proceeded at length, providing sources which had not been previously addressed at lgf, and he refrained from impugning his opponents' motives. eventually, charles entered the thread and banned him because, in his words, he had grown tired of reading his comments.

this was not the only case i have witnessed which undercuts the popular cult myth that "no one ever got banned who war'nt askin' fer it". charles once threatened to ban mandymanners because she posted a video of supertramp's "goodbye stranger" because he was ready to interpret anything from her, the last surviving conservative at lgf, as a "flounce". and, really, this is not new behavior. charles was too ready to ban for the crime of heterodoxy when he was a raving, paranoid, mccarthyite bigot as well.

on this, i must insist that you respect the fact that i have years more history at lgf than you. i was there during the period in which i staged my "untestable hypothetical". i know you would have been banned for contradicting the party line. as i was.

let me give you some background. i am not, nor have i ever been part of the blogmocracy crowd. unlike charles, i was never a birther or a "seekrit muslem" guy. unlike charles, i've never been an anti-immigration lunatic. i strongly dislike sarah palin and i am an atheist. it's also important to keep in mind that i, like charles, was a mccain supporter and decidedly not a paleo-libertarian. and yet i was, as i remain to be today, a conservative back when charles ran a sometimes troubling but generally worthwhile blog. despite charles' more extreme professions, i was able to tolerate him for his posts about the war on terror and the perfidy of the left. my posting account was -=@$$=-.

during the time that charles was promoting the inductive fallacy that, because stormfront had a ron paul banner on their site, ron paul was a "seekrit neo-nazi", i wrote a post which cut and pasted anti-jihad rhetoric from stormfront. the quotes i used could have easily been written by charles at the time. you see, while charles was still best buds with pam geller and robert spenser, i had already been aware that there was something about the direction of the anti-jihad movement which reeked of racial nationalism, and i was taking flack for saying so.

i suppose if i wanted to remain part of the open, reasoned discourse at lgf, which values a vast array of opposing viewpoints, i should have waited a couple years. posting it when i did, in the vast unacknowledged period that was before obama's inauguration, charles banned me - without a word. not even a "bye now!"

that's one of the things you have to consider when you try to float the claim that you've never seen someone be banned for simple disagreement. you may just have never seen it. because charles doesn't have to show you.

all of this leaves aside the serious question of whether a blog-owner who bans commenters for snarkiness or impolite disagreement isn't violating the de facto ethical rules of the blog-o-sphere. for a blog which hates rand paul-style paleo-libertarianism so deeply, charles and his community do love the trope, "this is charles' dime and he reserves the right to refuse service..."

in any case, when i said i was taking flack for opposing robert spenser, it was at other sites, because i knew that saying so at lgf would mean the end of my user account there. back when charles never wrote the word "racism" without enclosing it in sneer-quotes, even the slightest suggestion that there may be a racist component to any part of anti-jihadism would get you banned. calls to "glass mecca" might, on occasion, cause charles to come into the thread to say "calm down. that kind of talk might make us look bad." then, like today, charles pruned his commenting community with an intervening hand unequaled in the blog-o-sphere. he didn't get around to banning iron fist until 2009. the reason is simple: he didn't find anything wrong with it. then as it is now, charles has the commenting community he chose.

so, keep that in mind. keep in mind that, when charles laments that the one cool thing about bush was that he didn't pander to anti-muslem bigotry, in the actual time that bush was in office, charles was saying that the one terrible thing about bush was that he didn't pander to anti-muslem bigotry. keep in mind that when he talks about how deranged and paranoid the crescent-shaped missile defense logo stuff was, he created the story that a crescent shaped flight 93 memorial was a conspiracy to erect an "islamist shrine". keep in mind when charles talks about the bigotry of the arizona law, that he once argued that the u.s.-mexican border should be treated like the israel-gaza border.

or, as an alternative, you can try this. the next time you discover that a republican or conservative or the like has, in his or her past, some kind of peccadillo, and you're tempted to bring it to the fore, blow it out of proportion and use it to frame them as an eternal monster who should never be let within a mile of respectable discourse, consider that the unprincipled exception you make for charles johnson makes a hypocrite of you.

lgf charles created the "bigotted" "wingnut" line on "cordoba" and "al andalusia"

2010-08-10T04:08:00.009-04:00

I've written about charles johnson, proprietor of little green footballs, and his implausible pretense at amnesia about his own bigotry. so far i think the juiciest example has been his raving about the supposed bigotry inherent in opposing the "cordoba project", a proposal to build a mosque 400 yards from the site of the 9-11 attacks (well, perhaps the second juiciest).

when this all began, i wrote a post about charles' past positions, which range from the general endorsement of the idea that mosques should be treated as criminal enterprises and freely raided by federal agents, and that "islamic community centers" are in some sense stealth mosques, to his specific characterization of the lead figure of the cordoba project as an "islamic supremacist".

today charles left a post linking to some grad student's blog which aimed at re-defining the meaning of "cordoba" which, amongst islamic radicals and the "bigots" who oppose them alike, is a symbol of islamic conquest. after letting a lengthy blockquote do his blogging for him, he concludes with a pithy close:

Everything you’ve been told about Cordoba by the “anti-jihad” bloggers is wrong. Read the whole thing…

so, lets take a journey back to a time when the word "racist" never appeared in charles' writing without the use of sneer-quotes and see what "bigot brigade" blogger charles johnson told you about Cordoba and Al Andalusia. after all, charles was right out front way back in 2006 as an early developer of this meme: The Spanish Connection, Islam's Imperial Dreams.

read the whole thing...

Charles Johnson:

I think Agence France Presse should just rename themselves, “Al Jazeera Lite,” judging from this unbelievable piece of unvarnished, unedited Islamist propaganda

Charles Johnson:

They Shall Have War

And in Cordoba, Muslims are lobbying the Catholic Church to let them pray in the city’s Renaissance-era cathedral—and symbolically reclaim the site of a mosque built after the Islamic conquest of Spain in the 8th century: Muslims want to pray in Catholic cathedral.

Charles Johnson:

The Arab News gloats about the opening of a mosque in Spanish Granada:

...with design references to the Cordoba Mosque as well as to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, stood out as a magnificent landmark. Amid repeated shouts of “Allahu Akbar”...

...Sound familiar? It should; this is the same agenda the Wahhabis are following right here in the US of A, backed by the same whiny claims of discrimination.

Charles Johnson:

The Catholic bishops of Spain remember the reason for the Reconquista, as Muslims gradually retake through demographics and Arab oil money what they lost on the battlefield:

Spain’s bishops are alarmed by ambitious plans to recreate the city of Cordoba - once the heart of the ancient Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus - as a pilgrimage site for Muslims throughout Europe.

Plans include the construction of a half-size replica of Cordoba’s eighth century great mosque, according to the head of Cordoba’s Muslim Association.

Charles Johnson:

They’re teaching children that Islam is going to take over the whole world, and the mainstream media are covering it up.
...The following is some of the dialogue:

Hazim (Adult): Islam will spread to all parts of the earth from one end to the other and justice and good and kindness will spread. Did history witness a time period better than that when Islam ruled?…
Saraa: You beloved kids will be the ones who shall restore the glory and the culture
of the [Islamic] Nation.
Hazim (Adult): Every day do you remember Andalus (Spain)? This dear Andalus will return one day.

Charles Johnson:

Spain Becoming Al-Andalus

The ghosts of the Spanish warriors who fought to reclaim Spain from Muslim invaders are screaming in outrage: Spanish schools to use Islam book.

etc.

i could do a dozen more of those, but another stunner caught my eye while reading the comments under the "history lesson" post. consider this exchange:

180 tweav Sun, Aug 8, 2010 10:44:43am -8
Not all Muslim are terrorists, not all terrorist are Muslims.
but that's the way to bet.

183 Charles Sun, Aug 8, 2010 1:12:20pm 0

re: #180 tweav

That's your last comment at LGF. Go away

funny, when did that phrase fall out of favor with charles?

UPDATE: imam feisal abdul rauf then & now...

then: "...it’s no surprise to find them promoting yet another Islamic supremacist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, arguing in favor of bringing the medieval code of sharia law to Britain."

now: "He has NOT supported any radical causes, and in fact has written many articles making it clear that he's exactly the kind of Muslim moderate we should be encouraging."

UPDATE: another day brings another then & now...

then: "One of the most disheartening and disappointing things about the Bush presidency has been his insistence on remaining blind to the agenda of radical Islamists. Diana West is exactly right in this column: Guess Who Came to Iftar for Dinner?"

now: "George W. Bush had many flaws, but he did one thing very right: following the 9/11 attacks he resisted demonizing Muslims and instead called for tolerance. Bush consistently, unequivocally rejected the idea that the US was in a religious war with Islam itself, even though it would have been tremendously advantageous politically for him to encourage that idea in the right wing base."

UPDATE: speaking of things charles doesn't talk about any more, here's a news item which charles won't be reporting: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel on Monday of having been behind the 2005 killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

one last UPDATE: though this may be more appropriate in reference to charles johnson's "seekrit muslem" obsession, it's also illustrative in this case. if you want to see some of charles johnson's most extreme, paranoid, seekrit muslem freak-outs, read the archived collection of his paranoid, racist blog posts about congressman keith ellison.

read the whole thing...

senator robert byd was a lifelong progressive who saw nothing wrong with wholesale terrorism against black americans

2010-07-03T03:04:00.000-04:00

link

i think the original confusion comes from the conflation of progressivism and communism. there was as much an anti-communist tendency in the progressive movement as there was in any anglo/u.s. political movement of the era. this by no means defines the progressive movement out of the left. the progressive movement is, however, yet kin with the conservative movement under the banner of liberalism. communist states generally forsake or eliminate republican institutions. progressives actually want genuine republics. whether they are prone to behave like mad scientists with the citizenry they've preserved is a matter of opinion.

there is cause to question the influence of anti-communist priorities in byrd's decision to join up with the kkk. anticommunism didn't become a significant force in u.s. politics until the fifties, years after byrd was advising the klan on how to preserve it's influence. which, in turn, is years after he claimed to have quit the terrorist group.

i've wondered why "only for the anticommunism" is presented by progressives as exculpatory in byrd's case. doesn't that just make him a double-boogeyman?

and the "young man" made this "youthful indiscretion" at the wild and impetuous age of 31: "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation."

he joined the group when he was 24, which means the brevity of this "brief youthful indiscretion" measures at least seven years (that we know of)

the aforementioned fit appears to be ongoing.

2010-06-13T02:09:00.002-04:00

the aforementioned fit appears to be ongoing.

allah pundit didn't react to charles, so charles starts barking at ace.

here's what ace had to say.

charles: paranoid raving reminicent of norma desmond

2010-06-09T03:51:00.001-04:00

charles broke another armchair "scandal" about what doesn't appear in the edge of a news photo.

now he's whining that he isn't being given his due accolades for breaking this minor meta-angle:

That Crop-Happy Mainstream Media

In their four and a half minute video segment about Reuters cropping out the knives from those photos, Fox News crops out all mention of Little Green Footballs.

An absolutely classic case of Fox News lifting a story from the blogosphere without any attribution except unnamed “critics” and “bloggers.”

the troubble with this is that fox did specifically mention him and his website, per his own users:

6 MandyManners6/08/2010 5:03:26 pm

I posted a link earlier today of Foxnation giving Charles redit and someone else posted a link to Fox's main page in which he is given credt. IIRC, both quoted him, too.

Has CNN or MSNBC even touched this story?

it was on fox's front page. here's what they wrote:

At the popular blog Little- GreenFootballs.com, which initially took note of the missing knife, the blog’s founder, Charles Johnson, posted the story along with exhibits of both sets of pictures.

to which charles replies, "yea, but..."

11 Charles6/08/2010 5:04:34 pm

re: #6 MandyManners

I posted a link earlier today of Foxnation giving Charles redit and someone else posted a link to Fox's main page in which he is given credt.

But no link.

others note this, and the real charles starts to come out.

emphasis mine:

38 Charles6/08/2010 5:24:37 pm

re: #19 Rightwingconspirator

At the popular blog Little- GreenFootballs.com, which initially took note of the missing knife, the blog’s founder, Charles Johnson, posted the story along with exhibits of both sets of pictures.

Look what they did, though. They deliberately fucked up the URL, so that you couldn't even copy and paste it and get here.

it's a conspiracy.

how could he avoid thinking like this? he's surrounded himself with cultish sycophants who say stuff like this:

13 Dark_Falcon6/08/2010 5:06:59 pm

You give much of their audience butthurt, Charles. You regularly logic-spank Glenn Beck and they feel his pain.

mind you, this is the cult member's explanation for why fox didn't mention charles in their article... after it was shown upthread that fox specifically credited charles in their article. they're talking about how charles should sue and stuff. it's hilarious. go read.

charles has a fit

2010-06-09T02:58:00.000-04:00

this one is worse than the fit he threw with tim blair. the difference is that, while tim blair occasionally pokes charles, allahpundit has remained gracefully reticent to respond to charles' frequent baiting of him. i guess that makes all the difference.

shame on you allahpundit.

don't you know that charles johnson broke the story of the neo-nazi flag at the tea party rally?

that was a kilgore/charles original too, you know.

another good one was when kilgore found out that joseph p. stack of california was a ron paul supporter. not the same individual as the joseph a. stack of houston texas who flew the plane into the building after leaving a leftish political manifesto online, but truthier. fake but accurate. like the neo-nazi flag story.

kilgore also proved that you're a racist because, when he logged into hotair one night at 3:00 AM and posted the n-word a dozen or so times, you didn't delete it until you "woke up" the next morning. would you have us believe you sleep in the night?

you're going up against woodward and bernstein here.

i mean, how many times has charles asserted ownership of the rathergate story? he broke that thing wide open. after it was broken on a website he condemns as an eternal enemy of all things true and good. but he didn't steal anyone's glory on that one or anything.

i wonder if this thing were about anything but israel whether charles wouldn't be dismissing it as a "wingnut" "nontroversy".

it's been more than a week since helen thomas, formerly of the opposing team to charles, actually said "jews should go back to germany". charles hasn't posted a word about it. presumably this is just a "wingnut" "nontroversy" and there's a defensible nuance to her comments.

charles hasn't gotten to it yet because he's breaking stories about real antisemitism in the media. like this one in which he attempted to frame glen beck as an antisemite for briefly mentioning an anticommunist book which was written 70 years ago by someone who happened to be an antisemite.

clearly charles hasn't posted on helen thomas' direct and unequivocal expression of antisemitism, because that, you see, is a silly, wingnut "nontroversy," like the ground zero mosque story.

what's clear is that charles has written almost as many posts about how no one is sufficiently dropping his name in relation to this very important cropping story as posts about this very important cropping story. fox news is to be damned because it vaguely credited "bloggers" in its coverage of this very important story, rather than the correct, "champion of truth, charles johnson." he has a post dedicated to complaining that his site is getting hits from the reutters offices, yet no representative has yet appeared on television to announce that, "we would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for that meddling charles johnson."

a sad clown, is he.

UPDATE: remember when charles johnson defended ann coulter's "perfected jews" remarks?

charles knows what you are, though you design to conceal it.

2010-06-05T02:14:00.004-04:00

charles will soon regret this comment:

Of course they condemn it. You’re not supposed to use words like this. (In public.)

like, before the afternoon is out:

Report: Israeli Navy Intercepts 'Rachel Corrie'

we all know who rachel corrie is, of course:

Q. Who’s “St. Pancake”?
A. Some LGFers (not Charles) use this term to refer to Rachel Corrie, to express their irritation with the way terror apologists have turned someone who was, at best, naïve and foolish (and at worst, a terror supporter) into a holy icon in the fight against Israel. See:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5869
and
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=6228

There are many LGF threads about Rachel Corrie. Here’s the search page.

this is a big BTW here: the claim that charles "never used" the term, "saint pancake," is a LIE.

though charles has recently repeated the fiction that he "never liked" the term, he only developed this taste recently, during the media tour he did after his "parting ways" post.

but this fiction is protected under the "provisional truth" doctrine, and so we find some lgf users caught in the gap:

19 solomonpanting Fri, Jun 4, 2010 8:24:30pm

re: #9 Cato the Elder

Peaceful, loving, dear little Rachel Corrie. How could they do this to her?

I hear the Rachel Corrie was overtaken and run aground in two seconds flat.

38 Rightwingconspirator6/04/2010 8:31:26 pm PDT

re: #36 solomonpanting

Jokes about her death have been declared off limits by our host.

this is no joke. charles enters the thread almost five hundred comments in and lays down the law, repeating the "never liked" lie and threatening bannings. this did not go over well:

466 PaxAmericana Fri, Jun 4, 2010 10:36:39pm -6

re: #449 Charles

Just so we are all on the same page, which of the following words or phrases do you want consigned to the memory hole?

anti-idiotarian
MSM
PIMF
PIYF
FNDT
Rathergate
GAZE
Fiskie
nazimedia
bigelate / anything bigel-derived
lizardoid
minion (as applied to blog-followers)
Bwahahaha/Muwhahaha! (as said by members of the evil lizardoid Zionist conspiracy acknowledging their global power)
Morlocks (as referring to Indymedia types — borrowed from HG Wells)
Arafish
splodydopes
St. Pancake
Oil Ticks

oof. spoken like nekama herself.

the point that should be taken from this is that because charles has condemned the "saint pancake" smear - in fact, because he was moved to delete six comments from this thread - we know he's just donning a public disguise to conceal his true, hateful self.

let's go back to that original post of his. the one where he said...

Of course they condemn it. You’re not supposed to use words like this. (In public.)

what is he talking about? he's talking about a republican state senator, jake knotts, who called a candidate for governor a "raghead".

where is the complexity lost in this?

nikki haley, the candidate he called a "raghead", in addition to being a sikh woman, is the republican candidate for governor. worse for the narrative, while knotts is considered a "rino", haley is considered the tea party candidate.

so, you see, per charles' insight, the gop might conveniently condemn racist remarks like "raghead" in public, but in private, they... their rabidly racist, dogwhistle-tuned....

...wait, she's the "tea party candidate"?

nekama's lizard hammer

2010-06-02T00:46:00.001-04:00

352 Nekama Tue, Jun 1, 2010 8:19:37pm
re: #6 Charles

Yes, you can count on it. This idea that the Obama administration is somehow more anti-Israel than previous administrations is simply false.

Did you happen to notice this administration's vote on the NPT last week? You don't see Israel as a major target?

How about Obama's extremely hostile behavior (including Hillary's infamous 41 minute excoriation of Netanyahu) toward Israel for merely building in Jerusalem, which has never been considered a "settlement". I thought that was the low water mark for Obama's humiliation of one of America's greatest allies, but this incident lowers the bar further.

Yes, Charles, Obama should have risked pissing the world off. Doing what's right, even when unpopular, is what real leaders do.

Susan Rice - the one who mused about taking military action against Israel, making her Obama's choice for UN Ambassador - sat this one out and left it to her deputy to defend Israel against the lynch mob.

Now would have been a great moment to stand up to Turkey, point out their complicity and demand an explanation for provoking this entire mess. As you point out there was nothing on board those ships that was needed. It was a complete stunt to embarrass our strongest ally in that region and Obama failed miserably at pointing out who was really responsible.

Hillary, Obama's secretary of state, made matters even worse by repeating "The situation is Gaza is unsustainable and unacceptable" without pointing out that it is Hamas, and their intransigence, NOT Israel, that is exclusively responsible for that situation.

Charles, with Obama's dithering on Iran, the NPT, and failure to exercise real leadership in this situation, Obama is allowing Israel to remain bloodied and on the ropes while the world piles on.

353 Nekama Tue, Jun 1, 2010 8:29:19pm
re: #16 Charles

Right, because he should have just alienated everyone in the entire world, right?
What a lame excuse for not doing the right thing!

Because "everyone in the entire world" wants to demonize Israel for doing exactly what any sovereign nation would do when protecting it's borders (what a novel concept, Obama!) that makes it just fine for Barry to refuse to stand tall?

Israel, and the rest of the free, civilized world needs America to exercise real leadership in the face of increasingly bold provocation.

If America won't - or can't - stand up to the snakepit that is the United Nations today, then our slide toward European style impotency will continue to accelerate.

20 Charles8/17/2003 4:13:04 pm PDT

Nekama: A work of genius. I salute you.

this lgf post barely needs to be written

2010-05-28T05:07:00.006-04:00

it kinda writes itself. if you're still paying attention, you already know what's up with this:

Manhattan Community Board Endorses Mosque Near Ground Zero

Yesterday a community board in Manhattan voted to approve a proposal to build a mosque two blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood...

The anti-Muslim bigots of the so-called “anti-jihad” blogosphere are freaking out, of course.

i'm presuming he means anti-muslim bigots like himself:

The Multi-Million Dollar 9/11 Insult

that one was about the proposed "international freedom center", which wasn't a mosque, but more of a lefty desecration along the lines of "the best way for americans to deal with the memory of 9-11 is to meditate on the imperialistic racism which inspired the attack." per the linked search string above, charles was outraged, and this outrage led to long and wide-ranging coverage of the issue. another useful search string is "burlingame".

note, i'm not mocking this issue. i do regard the proposed ifc mock-memorial as a desecration. though charles wouldn't dare to revisit the issue, i'm certain he would describe the issue as a "wingnut nontroversy" if it were presented to him today.

still, this is an imperfect analogy. perhaps a better one would be to charles' documented bigotted paranoia about the "islamist shrine" charles saw in the design of a proposed flight 93 memorial.

and we know how charles feels about mosques in general:

Signs of Intelligent Life in Europe

We should be doing this in the US too: EU proposes monitoring radical mosques.

Homeland Security Now in Business of Protecting Mosques

Money allocated by the Department of Homeland Security to beef up security against Islamic terrorism at churches, synagogues, and other institutions is being used instead to protect mosques and Islamic centers from nonexistent “hate crimes.”

MacKinnon: We Have a Responsibility to Monitor US Mosques

...MacKinnon is exactly right in this article...

Undercover Mosque: The Return

Saudi Hate Ideology Fills US Mosques

...or how he feels about "islamic cultural centers"....

Guess Who Came to Iftar for Dinner?

One of the most disheartening and disappointing things about the Bush presidency has been his insistence on remaining blind to the agenda of radical Islamists. Diana West is exactly right in this column:

Swiss Capital Rejects Islamic Cultural Center

well, check the search string for "islamic center" and pull your own links.

the real heart of the matter is not what charles wrote before about other issues, but what he thinks about this particular issue of the islamic center near ground zero.

charles:

Why do I have the feeling this is going to turn out to be another distorted version of a totally innocuous story?

charles again:

I see we still have some anti-Muslim bigots hanging out at LGF.

This story is complete garbage. I'm disgusted that people are trying to hype it at my site.

and again:

Paranoia strikes deep.

"The U.S. and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end."
[Link: www.smh.com.au...]

That proves it. It's a sekrit jihad stronghold, right in Manhattan, masquerading as a place with a swimming pool.

so, what's different about this story?

charles notes that, contrary to what the "bigotbloggers" say, the proposed center is not a mosque, but an islamic cultural center. we've already covered that one.

in this last comment, charles is responding to capdiggs, who is speaking about the imam behind the cultural center, and his 2004 statements to the effect of "the west causes islamic radicalism."

charles scoffs, but the specific man in question is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, whom charles once specifically called out as an "islamic supremacist".

here's charles, in a second instance, being totally non-paranoid and non-bigotted in reference to rauf, the lead figure in the "cordoba center".

What's Right With Islam?

Eric Ormsby, an Islamic apologist at McGill University, writes about a “well-intentioned” book by a “moderate Muslim,” Feisal Abdul Rauf: What’s Right With Islam.

...

And of course, that remark about “despair and hopelessness” gives the lie to Ormsby’s claim of “good intentions.” This is the formulation universally used by Imams and Sheikhs when they wish to appear “moderate”—“condemn” suicide bombing, then, often in the same sentence, justify it. The message gets through loud and clear to their followers, while Western Islamic experts like Ormsby have a hook on which to hang their cherished illusions.

and, i have to leave it there.

there's more lunacy in that thread. the other thing i was going to address was name of the cultural center: the "cordoba" project.

whereas now the choice is praised because it references a metropolis from a point in islam's past in which islam was ascendant in the arts, sciences and civilization, cordoba used to have a different meaning for charles - as a reference to the islamic conquest of europe and a coded reference to califist ambitions to retake those lands in spain and elsewhere.

Spanish Cathedral Shuns Muslim Request

Spanish Bishops Sound the Alarm

The Catholic bishops of Spain remember the reason for the Reconquista, as Muslims gradually retake through demographics and Arab oil money what they lost on the battlefield: Spanish bishops fear rebirth of Islamic kingdom.

but judging from the fact that there are no deleted or dissenting comments in that thread apart from capdigg's, who was too kind to charles for not referencing charles' own heated rhetoric about mosques, islamic cultural centers, the meaning of the cordoba project's name or the lead figure behind it, perhaps the caravan has moved on from charles' clownish hipocrisy in name-calling "bigotbloggers" and the people still travelling with him are cynically indifferent to it.

BONUS: not racist.
proof again that, if charles has any discernable ideology, it is "presidentist".

UPDATE: imam feisal abdul rauf then & now...

then: "...it’s no surprise to find them promoting yet another Islamic supremacist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, arguing in favor of bringing the medieval code of sharia law to Britain."

now: "He has NOT supported any radical causes, and in fact has written many articles making it clear that he's exactly the kind of Muslim moderate we should be encouraging."

progressives murder, menace bankers

2010-05-23T05:09:00.002-04:00

progressives murder two bank tellers in greece.

progressives assault a bank exec's home in the u.s..

the banker is a classic antisemitic scapegoat.

provisional truth

2010-05-17T04:44:00.001-04:00

UPDATE: Nekama's Troll Hammer has been memory-holed, as was inevitable.

this comment is an interesting insight into the lgf cult.

Charles still has Nekama's Troll Hammer featured under "resources", so I believe I'm perfectly OK in linking it here.

did you get that?

"nekama's troll hammer" consists of a comprehensive stock rebuttal to all of the major anti-israel claims made by palestinian nationalists and supporters of the palestinian cause. it's completeness and perfection had made it a cherished relic within the lgf cult.

now, with trepidation, a "class of '04" lizard looks both ways before linking to it. it, like all of the posts charles wrote about obama being a "seekrit muslim", which he proudly notes that he has not deleted, is still on the website. but charles no longer apparently holds that obama is a "seekrit muslim". though he claims to have unequivocally disavowed his former belief in obama's "seekret muslim-ness", this disavowal is nowhere to be found on his site or anywhere else (it appears to be a post-facto fiction he tells). yet he ridicules and shames those who persist in the belief, appears to be eager to attribute the belief to as many targets as he can, and bans users from his site for endorsing the belief.

the "seekrit muslim" thing serves here only as an example of charles' manner of being this past year. it could be the issue of political correctness. it could be the righteousness of citizen journalism. it could be global warming or sarah palin or glen beck. the list of things charles has reversed himself on is exhaustive. the model applies to each and every one of them: charles, for most of his blogging carreer, endorsed "x", generated talking-points about "x", developed "x" as an issue and nurtured a community around shared affinity for "x". then, without explanation, or even a distinct declaration of the change, charles treats "x" and endorsement of "x" as anathema. lizards who are caught in the lurch are banned and former comrades are abused in the manner of eternal enemies.

so you can understand what is going on with the above-noted commenter's trepidation. support for israel is supposedly that thing charles has not and never will reverse himself on, but who's to say? who's to say that the turning point on that issue hasn't already passed, silently, within the confines of charles' head, and that such one-sided defenses of israel aren't now considered "kahanist propaganda" or similar?

the best the commenter can do is note that charles hasn't yet formally purged it from the site (as he has with the "lgf dictionary" and the old cox and forkum masthead illustration) and wince in expectation that, when he refreshes his browser, his posting account will have been blocked, without a word of explanation or opportunity for appeal.

that comment came in under one of the "We Got Mail!" threads, which was interesting because the hatemail was in response to an old 2007 post from when charles was a racist wingnut who believed that obama was a radical black nationalist communist of questionable origins and a seekrit muslim. consequently, the hatemail was from a muslim reader who was outraged about charles's approving blog post about lars vilks naming his dog "muhammed". of course, having presented a non-wingnut item, he must qualify the lapse with a declaration of who the real enemy is:

As absurd as this email is, it doesn’t even begin to compare with the level of ugliness and venom I see in my daily hate mail from right wingers, furious at me for not (strawman, strawman, strawman...).

obsessed. i have to figure that, if charles had a notably hateful specimen of this superior wingnut hate to share, he'd have shared it instead of the item he posted. it's probably more likely that he's hurting for a fix of negative attention, and this was meant to provoke some. hey! i'm blogging it!

in any case, charles is quite active in the thread defending attorney general holder against the meme that he's too politically correct or that he lacks the guts to say the words "islamic radicalism" in reference to the ft. hood massacre, the christmas bomb plot or the recent times square bomb incident. charles' argument is that, in the relevant clip of holder being interrogated by a congressional pannel, holder was trying to give a complete, nuanced answer, and the whole, "why can't he just say 'islamic radicalism'" meme is a vile and vulgar wingnut contrivance.

also from charles:

Huge kudos to Lou Dobbs for standing up against the nauseating flood of politically correct media that refuses to call our enemy by its true name.

you can't imagine how many more examples of this "shame on them for not being able to bring themselves to name the real enemy: islamic extremists!!" rhetoric i could cite. i'm choosing this one because it includes a praiseful citation of lou dobbs (one of dozens).

in fact, the lizard charles is arguing with about this is cato the elder, who's shadow-stepping of charles is of a character somewhere between killgore' and wild irish rose's. how could he have known that it is now acceptable for a democrat to vacillate on the identity of the terrorist threat at lgf. how could he know that it is now a condemnable "wingnut" abuse to show anger at a democrat's vacillation on the identity of the terrorist threat?

and, one more hit before i go back to ignoring lgf for another week.

Gingrich: Obama Should Withdraw Kagan's Nomination Because Harvard Takes Saudi Money

right, so in this one, charles is basically pushing back on an attack on obama's supreme court nominee because... well... he doesn't really support her - he doesn't know who she is or even what criteria a supreme court nominee should be judged on. that sort of stuff is beyond charles' ken, outside of his milieu. he just knows she's on the obama team, and so she is a figure to be defended.

Here’s Newt Gingrich racing for the bottom on Fox News, saying Obama should withdraw Elena Kagan’s nomination ...launching an attack on Harvard (where Kagan was dean of the law school), because they accept Saudi money. It’s unclear how this is supposed to be Kagan’s responsibility, but it’s a nice, juicy red meat attack for the tea party base.

also from charles:

Saudi Money for Harvard and Jimmy Carter

Saudi Money Well Spent (insinuating that the nytimes is a saudi-bought mouthpiece)

Saudi Arabia Is After Our Children

so you see, saudi money being accepted by harvard taints jimmy carter because there is a program named after him there, but it doesn't taint elena kagan, though she was an administrative executive at the time the funds were accepted. and saudi money in schools is a very serious thing, bound to turn our youth into burkah-wearing suicide bombers.

or maybe that's wrong. maybe the saudi money accepted by harvard only used to taint carter, and saudi money is no longer such serious business.

who knows?

charles caps it off with this:

On the one hand, Harvard accepts money from Saudis. Saudi Arabia, by the way, executes homosexuals, Saudi Arabia represses women, Saudi Arabia does not allow Christians or Jews to practice their religion, but Saudimoney is fine.
This is rich, coming from the spokesperson for a party that wants to take away the right to choose from women, is just as anti-homosexual as Saudi Arabia, and is just as committed to promoting one religion above all others as Saudi Arabia.

yes charles. exactly the same. as stridently as charles was when he'd hurl recriminations against the "moonbats" of the left, he was never as unfair and given to calumny as he is with the right. maybe that's what's being reflected in his hatemail.

charles and political correctness

2010-05-06T17:40:00.003-04:00

now

then

the "now" is this:

The wingnut blogosphere is fuming and hissing with outrage over this story today: Students Kicked Off Campus for Wearing American Flag Tees.

What? They were kicked out of school just for wearing US flag clothing? Outrage!

...

Is it possible they weren’t just expressing their patriotism, but were in fact using the American flag as a deliberate insult to Hispanic students? Why yes, it is.

...

What school principal wouldn’t have done the same thing? Don’t they have a responsibility to maintain order in school? And if so, isn’t it blindingly obvious that they need to take action when students do things that are designed to create conflict and bad feelings?

the "then" is this:

Here’s the latest outrage to come from the moral equivalence mindset, as school administrators in North Carolina banned the wearing of the US flag—because they didn’t want to favor one flag over another.

Not even their own country’s flag. This is bad craziness.

followed up with this:

NC Flag Ban Lifted - Update: New Details - Incident Prompted by Mexican Flag Protests

here, is charles, in a post tauntingly titled, "Hey, ACLU: You Missed One Over Here", linking to the anti-immigration site, saveourstate, to bash the ACLU for suing the california government to remove the christian symbology. here's the actual text of his "outrageous outrage":

Will the flag of Maryland be the next target of the Judeo-Christo-phobic ACLU?

now, i could go on all day noting that charles' shrillness about anti-immigration racism starkly contradicts everything he wrote before yesterday. but if you add islam into the mix of public schools...

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/19349_Hands_Are_OK

CAIR Seething Over Christian Evangelist

Learning to Be Good Dhimmis in Ridgefield

Teaching Kids to Love the Burqa

or...

Muslims Offended by English Flag

so lets go through charles' comments.

UPDATE: this thread has gone on to be particularly entertaining. worth scrolling through.

This really is not a difficult concept. The students wearing the flag intended to provoke Mexican students. School officials acted to prevent this, before it got out of hand. End of story. Put the outrage away.

re: #57 rwdflynavy

I just reread the article and missed the part where the students said they wore the flag to provoke Mexican students.

Really? So you think it was completely innocent?

Ohhkay.

And if you're trying to provoke tensions between races in America, one way to do it is to show up with in-your-face American flag clothing on Cinco de Mayo.

The real idiots here are the parents who put these kids up to this little stunt.

you might note that there's no indication of that in the article and it would seem that this is an inference on charles' part. it is. when challenged, charles attempts to support the claim by noting that the kids' parents have responded to press requests for comment. "In fact, two of the parents went on Laura Ingraham's show this morning."

We'll be seeing more incidents like this, deliberately intended to provoke racial tensions and then exploit the resulting fallout for xenophobic red meat.

now, taking all of that in, do you get the impression, as i do, that the real display of overwrought outrage is charles'?

as a bonus, we get this:

On the Obama flag pin issue -- I criticized Obama during the campaign over this:

[Link: littlegreenfootballs.com...]

I really don't care very much whether politicians wear flag pins or not; it's not an issue for me at all. What I criticized were Obama's own statements on why he didn't wear the pin, which I thought were politically tone deaf and intended to appeal to the left wing. (Like a lot of Obama's campaign rhetoric.)

See, I can still criticize Obama.

it's funny that he's trying to reconcile his current stances with his previous stances and linking back to them, since he bans mere users for attempting the same.

RELATED:

Roger Ebert tweets:

Kids who wear American flag t-shirts on 5 May shouldhave to share a lunchroom table with those who wear a hammer and sickle on 4 July.

that's just weird. do you suppose a public school principal would discipline a student for wearing a hammer and sickle shirt, or a che guevarra shirt, on july 4th, or any other day?

charles and the arizona law

2010-05-05T17:49:00.002-04:00

i've mentioned it before, but as charles gets increasingly shrill and self-rightious about this, it bears repeating: charles has a long history of racism against latinos and border-enforcement derangement. these are views he has never repudiated in any terms at any time in any place.

it is true that the author and sponsor of the bill appears to be a barely closeted white nationalist and a republican. it is not an insignificant point. any one can view the record of my personal views on this issue, starting here.

if you read a few of those items, the question might arise as to what it is i actually disagree with charles about. that's another post. in short, the immigration nutters are a poison which obscure without penetrating a set of immutable philosophical truths which comprise conservatism. it's on that basis i can condemn this group and that policy undertaken by nominally "conservative" members of the "conservative movement", such as it is, while maintaining those underlying truths. charles, on the other hand is a superficial sportsman amongst ideologues. he knows some buzzwords "score" and some things in politics are out-of-bounds while yet other things are red-flagged. as the score is tallied, he decides which team he is on. and for whichever team he is on, he is a sore loser and an obnoxious bleacher fan.

when charles was an anti-immigration loon, i was taking flack on conservative message boards for saying that the border-enforcement issue was for cranks and racists. now when charles is saying that the border-enforcement issue is for cranks and racists, i'm saying that the border-enforcement issue is for cranks and racists. see the difference? i never had to lavishly disaggregate myself from my former views in order to stake a morally consistent position, not because i'm against changing my mind, but because i'm for thinking carefully and clearly before opening my mouth. charles? not so much.

not just on the "thinking clearly and carefully" thing. i've noted before that charles hasn't "changed his mind," he's only betrayed comrades. charles is rigidly consistent, it's just that his is, as i've noted, the consistency of a sophist. it is the consistency of "i played 'gotcha' with anonymous commenters on the blue team's blogs, so now i'm playing 'gotcha' with anonymous commenters on the red team's blogs." it's the foolish consistency you always hear spoken of.

charles cannot think for himself, so he builds a chinese wall of arbitrary "red-flags" around him to keep the baddies from penetrating his world, whether they be "moonbats" or "wingnuts". for this, charles' milieu is one giant example of obtuse inductive fallacy; "if teh eevil ones are known to say "x", then anyone who says "x" is teh eevil one."

charles has reduced the tea party movement to a red flag. he toiled feverishly reduce it to the one-dimensional malediction as quickly as possible to avoid allowing any actual thing from it to corrupt his pre-determined support for obama (a barely two-dimensional figure in his mind, which represents the balanced symmetry of the state).

but when the leading "tea party candidate" opposes the arizona bill on no uncertain terms, it kinda breaks your meme, charles.

Marco Rubio:

“I think aspects of the law, especially that dealing with ‘reasonable suspicion,’ are going to put our law enforcement officers in an incredibly difficult position. It could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens. Throughout American history and throughout this administration we have seen that when government is given an inch it takes a mile.”

other people charles has placed beyond the pale:

Gov Rick Perry

“I fully recognize and support a state’s right and obligation to protect its citizens, but I have concerns with portions of the law passed in Arizona and believe it would not be the right direction for Texas,”

Karl Rove

“I think there is going to be some constitutional problems with the bill,”

Jeb Bush

“I think it creates unintended consequences. It’s difficult for me to imagine how you’re going to enforce this law. It places a significant burden on local law enforcement and you have civil liberties issues that are significant as well.”

Connie Mack

“the new Arizona law strikes a severe blow to freedom and the principles that make our nation strong. This law of ‘frontier justice’ – where law enforcement officials are required to stop anyone based on ‘reasonable suspicion’ that they may be in the country illegally – is reminiscent of a time during World War II when the Gestapo in Germany stopped people on the street and asked for their papers without probable cause. It shouldn’t be against the law to not have proof of citizenship on you.

“This is not the America I grew up in and believe in, and it’s not the America I want my children to grow up in.”

progressives: if it can't be a teabagger, it must be the jews

2010-05-04T13:56:00.002-04:00

how did progressives respond to the times square bomb attempt?

first they went all-in on the claim that it was "another" example of this so-far elusive "tea bagger terrorism" phenomenon. but then they tracked the guy down, and he seems to have been an islamist.

this makes the left's score on the whole "tea bagger terrorism" thing 0 for 5:

sparkman "muder" - suicide
joe stack - marx quoting progressive
bidel shooting - registered democrat
john lee wilkes - disgruntled with custody court judge

maybe 0 for six or seven. i've lost count. and now this one.

there will be many round-ups of the left's certitude of the teabagging nature of the attempted bombing better than i'm willing to compile, but here's a good one to start.

over at raw story, you see the model of how the progressive left has dealt with this event. first comes the certitude that the perpetrator was a glen beck fan. then, they springboard from this assumption into eliminationist rhetoric about how "now is the time" to round up all of the left's political opponents and gas them "before it's too late". then, when it comes out that the culprit is not a "teabagger", but an islamist, the thread immediately nosedives into antisemitic conspiracy theories about mossad-led "false flag ops".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/02/times-square-car-bomb-sus_n_560285.html

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/it-would-be-irresponsible-not-specula
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/even-blind-squirrel-finds-occasional

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/05/03/bloomberg_nyc_bomb_suspect_someone_with_a_political_agenda.html

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2010/05/04/msnbcs-contessa-brewer-frustrated-times-square-bomber-muslim-0

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2010/05/04/oops-leftwing-blogosphere-forced-embarrassing-backtrack-times-square-b

the funny thing here is that the last bombing of times square was done by a home-grown progressive antiwar-protester.

UPDATE:
the spread get's wider, as the judge in the famed hutaree militia case drops the case.

eliminationism

2010-05-04T12:57:00.000-04:00

this is the sort of eliminationist rhetoric david niewert approves of.

and you can find it on the left even when they hold the reigns in all three branches of government. and in the wake of huge policy victories. and in reaction to civil dissent.

antigovernment violence teabaggers anarchists

2010-05-03T11:44:00.000-04:00

here: link

mayday is the day progressives and "anarchists" celebrate the past glories of soviet tanks rolling over the skulls of formerly free peoples.

it's analogous to what it would be like if skinheads were granted parade permits to march in celebration of krystalnacht.

for all of the talk about the supposed "danger" posed by teaparty protests, and the implicit "threat" of their small-government rhetoric, the coverage of the political factions of the left who actually brand themselves as "revolutionary" "anarchists" tends to minimise the inevitable vandalism, destruction, and violence which consistently accompanies their protest marches.

when a bunch of anarchists break off and smash storefronts, set fire to trash cans and huck rocks at cops, the press describes a "'mostly peaceful" event. when a korean war vet and his wife hangs out on the green holding a sign opposing the auto company bailouts, it's portrayed as an "angry" display of "antigovernment rage".

this is not an isolated opportunity for comparison. "anarchists" behaved this way throughout the bush years. they have been arguably the lead feature of the protest movement of the left since the wto riots of 1999. so when the teaparties started in 2008, and the media and the left immediately began framing them as a dangerous antigovernment mob with the potential for violence, the double-standard stood out in stark relief.

to this day the only few instances of violence at teaparty events have been the work of progressive counterprotesters. for instance, when seiu union thugs mob-stomped kenneth gladney.

knowing anarchists and their place of prominence within the activist left, i've often found myself left speechless at statements like "anti-goverment sentiment is exclusive to the right". this nonsense was used to portray the houston plane crash nut as a conservative"teabagger" despite his having left behind a manifesto which cited support for socialized healthcare and opposition to capitalism and concluded by approvingly quoting marx.

so called "anarchists" are a leftwing phenomenon who seek revolution and, in theory, the abolition of government AND universal healthcare, housing, nourishment and all of the cradle-to-grave public welfare we in the real world know requires an overly-empowered and consequently inefficient and abusive government. how is this possible? they believe the lie of marxism. they believe that the natural state of man is to seek perfect socialism and that history is leading inevitably in that direction, and that governments only exist to maintain a class hierarchy.

in other words, their heads are up their asses.

but the fact that their ideology is internally contradictory and stupid doesn't negate the fact that they are doctrinally, socially, and coalitionally of the left.

and here again we see that the left's antigovernment rhetoric translates into lawlessness, while the right's small-government rhetoric translates into being beated up both literally and figuratively by the establishment left.

but the tea parties are "dangerous" "mobs". got it.

i just want to leave one example of the media and the left's deference to leftwing anti-government violence.

during one "antiwar" protest in san fransisco. a group of anarchists ran riot through mission hill, smashing storefronts, lighting things on fire, etc. during the course of this, one of the officers who responded was ambushed by several anarchists who split his skull with a bike lock. an anarchist who was videotaping his buddies' violence so he could post it on his blog was subpoenaed to produce his footage of the crime.

the mainstream press' response to this act of anti-government violence? well, they didn't cover the actual act of violence at all - that was the "mostly peaceful" part, don't you know. instead they covered the contempt hearings of the anarchist blogger who refused to turn over his videotape of his buddies' act of antigovernment violence. they took him in as one of their own and framed his case as some sort of important stand on behalf of shield laws.

imagine a "teabagger" getting that kind of reach-around from the mainstream media.

obama's katrina?

2010-05-01T01:39:00.001-04:00

is the recent catastrophic oil gush in the gulf coast obama's katrina?

the comparison is being made. but people forget that katrina was meant to become the democrats' 911, in the sense that the only thing that progressives took from 911 was that the phenomenon of "chickens coming home to roost" within the heart of the hegemon seemed to create a wide political space for simple-minded jingoist reactionaries to wield political influence. consequently, progressives sought to transform the katrina disaster into the sort of suffering they could exploit*. in other words, "obama's katrina" would be something 911-ish. for the grace of a malfunctioning detonator on a pair of explosive skivvies, the christmas bomber did not become obama's katrina.

the better analogy is to the sago coal mine disaster. and, yes, of course progressives blamed bush for it.

this image illustrates why that exploitation of the crisis was so baseless.

*to understand that the meaning of katrina for progressives had nothing to do with the tragedy of human suffering and everything to do with stirring populist outrage, check with frank rich, who argued that "obama's katrina" was the dire need to marshal all of his charismatic powers and political machinery to out-populist the teaparty movement before they and the economy swallow him.

returning to the human suffering angle, mickey kaus seemed to think this was obama's katrina.

2010-04-28T18:25:00.000-04:00

since the author of this piece has not yet approved my posting account on his site, i'll leave my response here for now.

i can answer each of these items by reference to equivalent or worse examples from just two years ago when another man was president and progressives concomitantly professed that dissent was the highest form of patriotism.

i might start with the fact that progressives began protesting president bush on the day of his inauguration to his first term in office, and these demonstration included violent clashes with police, fires set in public streets, smashed storefronts, comparison's of then-governor bush to hitler, calls to rescind the election result based in large part on a kooky conspiracy theory about shadowy interests "rigging" electronic voting systems, and the hurling of eggs and debris at the presidential motorcade. whatever you think of how president bush would go on to govern as president, progressives behaved this way before bush had yet even been sworn in. this conduct was smiled upon by the mainstream democrat party apparatus. in the 2004 major theatrical release, Fahrenheit 911, which, in it's first half explicated the conspiracy theory that president bush planned, allowed, or in some sense connived with the bin laden family via the carlyle group to have the 911 terrorist attacks happen so that he could enrich himself from the building of an oil pipeline through afghanistan, progressives' conduct at the 2001 inaugural proceedings was portrayed as the natural and morally sound dissent of an organic assembly of people with beautiful souls. this film was used as an asset by the dnc during the 2004 campaign; arranging screenings, conducting seminar calls to promote the film, etc..

many of the things you ask us to "imagine if" in analogy to black perpetrators never happened with white perpetrators.

many of the things you ask us to "imagine if" could be cited as having happened already. i suppose we can then interrogate the differing meta-contexts of how the thing was portrayed when the perpetrator was left versus when the perpetrator was right (for instance, when "take our country back" was howard dean's campaign slogan during his 2004 presidential primary, or when the dnc used the visual devise of crosshairs on a map to "target" republican incumbents. or when then john kerry said, suggesting president bush should be assasinated: "I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone." etc. etc. etc.)

and i suppose once all of the items on your litany have been addressed, we could entertain a few additional "imagine if's". what if white racial activists stood at the doors of a polling place armed with batons and knives loudly warning voters that voting the "wrong" way would result in violent consequences? what if the attorney general appointed by the president said thugs were promoting through threats of violence continually tabled prosecution of the thugs? what if the president's chief of staff organized third-party organizations to physically confront citizens protesting his policy initiatives at constituent meetings, resulting in violence? what if, say, john mccain had personal and professional dealings with, say, eric rudolf? we could go on in this vein.

it's something i may undertake later in the day if i find the time. i think some of what makes this sort of litany so risible in the eyes of the people it is intended to impugn is that it's either occurring in a space of ignorance bred from bias-confirmation and "epistemic closure", or an exercise in churlishly pretending at amnesia, and thus deliberately dishonest in a way which can only hope to successfully deceive ignorant people.

if any part of it could be said to be patently offensive, it would be your grotesque conflation of your own identity as a white, progressive male and the need to serve the narrative agendas of the officially empowered progressive movement with the experience of being black in america. the two separate things, progressive politics and blackness, do not fuse together simply by virtue of being wedged together and shoved in under the first word of the first paragraph of an essay. it remains an undemonstrated assumption, and you can see where it buckles and juts out in several places here, (for instance, where you attempt to shift the context of rush limbaugh's remarks about defeating democrats to suggest they were about eliminating black people). the effect is that you appear to regard yourself as entitled to exploit black americans as sandbags to stack up into revetments for you to duck behind.

and, i guess, shame on you for that.

charles johnson's obama derangement syndrome catalogued

2010-04-27T03:12:00.000-04:00

nowadays charles posts scientific studies like this and mocks people who believe that the president is a "seekrit muslem" (or is it "mooslime"? no that's from the lgf glossary he "unhappened" recently).

tim blair has gone through the archives to fully catalog charles' ods. while it may be overstating the thing to say that charles was a full blown "birther", there is no dispute that charles johnson is one of those who believed that the president was a "seekrit muslem".

he also was firm in the conviction that obama is a marxist radical. but another interesting thing, in light of his hatred of glen beck, whom he once loved, is that charles at one time also believed that the president was a racist. interesting because his entire case in the present for the claim that glen beck is a racist is that glenn beck once called obama a racist.

at which point we may as well come back to the "birther" thing and charles' relative culpability in that particular form of ods. as i put it to him a while back in a comment at dangerousminds he had removed:

we are all in agreement that “birthers” are irrational because they persist in questioning the president’s “natural born” status long since definitive documentary evidence has been presented. when you posted about the “questions” about president obama’s birth certificate, the matter was yet unresolved, and you have since adjusted your views according to the facts available. it is however additionally said that birthers are racist. do you believe that the fact that you looked at a black american man with a foreign-sounding name and concluded that his nationality was suspect is somehow canceled out because you stopped pursuing a debunked fact claim? or does the impetus which drove that decision permanently stain you?

anywho, charles is also recently quite put off by anti-immigration racism against latinos. witness this post:

AZ Truck Driver Handcuffed, Forced to Show Birth Certificate

though charles' take on this has it's expected factual shortcomings, i can't say this law is any good. it disgusts me, actually.

with that in mind, it's worth it to remember that charles johnson is a tancredo-ite racist who is obcessed with nonsense about "reconquista" and the like.

2010-04-18T13:56:00.002-04:00

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/How-Clinton-exploited-Oklahoma-City-for-political-gain-91267829.html

LGFail

2010-03-31T02:35:00.002-04:00

LGFail.