Not so long ago I was moved to comment on Charles Johnson and his swing to the left in this post. As fate would have it, the post was picked up and passed around by a lot of ex-LGFers at a disturbingly large variety of web sites serving the needs of this (apparently) quite sizable demographic.
And for me, that's unfortunate.
These days I always wince when I get a link from someone. At present I have, I suspect, a regular readership in the low hundreds, which is exactly the level I feel comfortable with. You see, there is such a thing as bad traffic. For me, bad traffic consists of people who do not know this site coming here solely for the purpose of validating their own, pre-existing opinion on whatever matter happens to be at hand. They don't care about who I am or what I am about; they're all about finding someone to tell them they're smart and they're right.
These folks bore me.
Even more unfortunately, many of them simply want you to keep repeating the opinion in question so they can continue to feel they're smart and right. That is even duller. Back in August, while trapped in the house 24/7 after some surgery, I decided to conduct an experiment: I decided to see how fast I could grow my site traffic by turning DtP into nothing more than a linked-out, rabidly anti-Obama web site. I chose my topics solely on whether they'd made Drudge, Memeorandum or one of the A-list blogging sites.
The results were surprising, or at least they were for me. Within two weeks of starting the experiment my daily pageviews had gone from between 350 and 500 to over 2,000. A week later I was over 2,500 pageviews and still growing. And while the sort of posting involved in this experiment was time-consuming, it certainly didn't tax the brain. All I had to do was select a news item that reflected poorly on Barack Obama and pour on the venom.
Dull, dreary and brain-dead... despite the fact that I've come to loathe Barack Obama.
I mention this because I now have ex-LGFers pestering me to write more negative posts about Charles Johnson. This annoys me. My interest in Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs is now what it has always been: Marginal. And those folks aren't here because they value anything about DtP, they were here because they wanted what they wanted. Just like the anti-Obama crowd that ended up here. I've got news for the LGF crowd: If I really felt the need to validate my personal worth via site traffic, I'd have stuck to the anti-Obama schtick.
So, to those ex-LGFers showing up here:
Charles Johnson is a nothing; got that? He's a floundering middle-aged failure who is so completely pathetic that he needs his sense of self-worth validated by the site traffic he gets on a blog.
A fucking blog.
Think about that for a moment. Just step back and think about that. Does that sound healthy to you? Now step back again and ask yourself what sort of person ends up obsessing about his non-face-to-face relationship with a creepy middle-aged loser he's never actually met. And think about that.
I'd never visited Little Green Footballs until the spring of 2004, and only then because Roger L. Simon wanted to bring Charles in on Tulip Advertising. I was not impressed, and did not go back again until after my little to-do with Roger and Charles started up in the summer of 2005. At that time I actually spent some time at LGF just to try to gain a bit of insight on one of the men who'd screwed me.
I found it unappetizing mixture of bigotry, ignorance, groupthink and general creepiness.
And in that respect, Little Green Footballs is no different today then it was back in 2005. Fundamentally, neither Little Green Footballs nor Charles Johnson has changed a whit over the past four years. He's still a bigot, he's still intolerant, he's still dishonest and he's still genuinely creepy. The only thing that has changed is that he is no longer serving the interests of certain portion of the right-wing blogosphere. That is the only thing that has changed.
The.Only.Thing.
So to all the ex-Lizardoids (or whatever the fuck it was you called yourselves back then), understand that my contempt for Charles Johnson has nothing to do with his political views, although those certainly are (and were back in 2004) worthy of much contempt in and of themselves. In my dealings with him, I found him to be unethical and dishonest in all respects on a purely personal level. He was a dishonest man. Period. And, if you followed my war on Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson and did not understand you were enamoured with a dishonest, unethical and incompetent fool, well, all I can say is that is very much to your discredit.
By the end of November, 2005 anyone who wanted to know should have known that Charles Johnson was a dishonest man. For many of you who are now his now ex-followers, that didn't matter back then because Charles Johnson was serving your needs and validating your sense of self-worth. And for some bizarre reason, now that Charles Johnson had decided to serve the needs of someone else in exactly the same manner he served you, you think there's been some sort of fundamental shift in his principles.
I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but Charles Johnson never had principles in the first place. And that is why you are where you are and Charles Johnson is where he is. If you'd been paying attention, you would have known that years ago.
Years ago.
I'd suggest that if you're genuinely shocked about what's happened with Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs since he got the boot from Roger and Pajamas Media, you need to be taking a good, hard look in the mirror. You hitched your wagon to a scumbag, and if you're honest with yourself, you can go back through your time at LGF and find instances that should have told you who you were dealing with.
In the meantime, take your needy whining for validation elsewhere.
