It is curious, isn't it, that Little Green Balls is profiled in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine? (/not)
Chuckie is getting mainstream coverage when his influence and his traffic are guttersnipe low. But when Johnson was masquerading as a rational and decent voice with a circulation of 120,000 unique visitors a day, no one in big media ever paid him any mind. But since he has turned coat and transformed himself into a website of hate and smears, the left comes knocking like a sailor who just got paid.
Last week the LA Times did a mind-numbing puff piece on him, and today the pathetic Barrett Brown of Vanity Fair does a totally kissie-assie post on a slug whom they once reviled and despised. But wait, it gets better. Tomorrow, the very pinnacle of leftist elitist media, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, has done a full spread.
But Chuck, groveling, stepping and fetching to garner favor with his new overlords of the left, fell short with the NY Times. The LA Times went for it hook, line and stinker (embarrassingly so, for them), but not so with the NY Times. Jonathan Dee, who penned the piece, actually wrote responsibly. And while I don't agree with all he wrote, Dee was fair.
Perhaps this will throw a wrench into CJ being the recruiting tool for on the fence moderate bloggers or right wing blogs with no spine. You too can be a spineless stah if you turn on your friends. The message is that you'll remain invisible when you espouse the rational and logical argument, but stab your allies in the back and you too will be the dahlink of the left.
Charles showed me what he was in 2007. Biggie small. All this handwringing now is merely exhuming the body. Who cares? He showed his ugly inside then; three years later it is boring.
Robert Spencer pulls my quote as his headline: "The way he went after people was like a mental illness": And he goes on to write:
The New York Times has a surprisingly even-handed and generally (but not entirely) accurate piece about how libelblogger Charles Johnson betrayed his friends and abandoned his principles. Unlike the LA Times and Vanity Fair, the Gray Lady, oddly enough, seems less inclined to reward Johnson for his betrayal.
The irrational hatred and determination to destroy others no matter what lies need to be told to do it, the paranoia, the roaring-mouse totalitarianism and cultishness, the self-obsession and self-righteous preening, the howlingly superficial thought processes -- in short, every tendency we have come to know and love in Charles Johnson over the last two years is on display in this piece, "Right-Wing Flame War!," by Jonathan Dee, January 21. Some highlights:
[...] "It's just so illogical," [Pamela] Geller told me heatedly not long ago. "I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There's an evil to that, a maliciousness. He's a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?" [...]IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited -- Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer
of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two -- but he did not go. "I'm just not a joiner of these things," he says.[...]
An aside: he didn't design the site as it currently appears. This one was designed by the superlative, nonpareil Charles Nolan. The site has been thoroughly de-lizardized.
The common line at LGF that he warned Pamela Geller and me not to go to this conference because of the alleged appearance of "fascists" there is false. Johnson never spoke with me about this conference before it happened. And once more, for the record, despite Johnson's lies, this was no "neofascist" or "racist" conference. A Knesset member, Aryeh Eldad, was among the speakers, as was the great historian Bat Ye'or. Andrew Bostom
spoke about Islamic antisemitism. Patrick Sookhdeo spoke about the Islamization of England. I spoke. Filip Dewinter did not speak.
Johnson began taking shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now . . . linked. Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.This is a hasty telescoping of events that unfolded over a year. Pamela Geller took the brunt of his attacks. He didn't turn on me until later. I was trying to keep the peace between both sides. I regret that I did not call him on his dirty dealing earlier.
"Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore," Spencer says. "But I don't consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That's an outrageous kind of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a supporter or her work, or her of mine?" [...]
Check out the article for yourself.....The Times didn't cave like the LA Times did. Jonathan Dee was rather fair.
No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.
“This is one area where I did change,” Johnson admitted. “I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can’t see each other.”
McCain weighs in here.
