Dennis the Peasant

Charles Johnson's Dorian Gray Moment...

Charles Johnson is at it again.

Over at the steaming pile that is Little Green Footballs, Charles jumps up and down, waves his arms frantically, and screams, "Look at me!! Look at me!!" to the rest of the political blogosphere. For his troubles he gets a shout out from Think Progress.

Wow. Think Progress.

Anyway, this is what has Mr. Moral Authority all aflutter...

What exactly does Doug Hoffman stand for? And who is he standing with? Would you believe … Glenn Beck?

At the endorsements page of Doug Hoffman For Congress, we find a link to the “Gold List” at 912candidates.org, consisting of politicians who have “pledged their sacred honor” to uphold the Glenn Beck 9/12 Project’s “9 Principles and 12 Values.”

Of course, you mention the word "honor" to Charles Johnson and what you're going to get is a blank look. That's a given. Remember, this is the greasy conman who rode Roger L. Simon's dirty coattails for all it was worth, and who is now trying to hitch onto the coattails of larger, more useful, fry.

And since he seems to think them damning, here's the 9 principles and 12 values...

The 9 Principles:

1. America is good.
2. I believe in God. He is the center of my life.
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
6. I have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
9. The government works for the people. The people do not answer to the government; the government answers to the people.

The 12 Values:

1. Honesty
2. Reverence
3. Hope
4. Thrift
5. Humility
6. Charity
7. Sincerity
8. Moderation
9. Hard Work
10. Courage
11. Personal Responsibility
12. Gratitude

Can you see why these principles and these values would horrify someone like Charles Johnson? I sure can. Charles Johnson is...

... a divorced atheist, a failed musician, a failed internet businessman and a failed pundit/public intellectual. He made his name, such as it is, practicing standard, mindless anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry. When he thought he could make a buck helping Roger L. Simon lie, cheat and swindle folks through Pajamas Media, he did so and did so cheerfully.

And...

... when it became obvious that neither mindless anti-Muslim bigotry nor Simon's PJM con game was going to get him where he wanted to be (either in terms of money or ego gratification) he betrayed all of his so-called friends and associates by turning upon them. He now courts, in the name of personal advancement only, the sort of people - such as Markos Moulitsas of DailyKOS - who a few years ago he was damning as the worst of the worst.

Of course Beck's 9 Principles and 12 Values horrify Charles Johnson. He's a greedy, amoral, self-obsessed nonentity. He looks at what Glenn Beck and Doug Hoffman take seriously and recoils. He pretends -and I do mean pretends - that he is recoiling at conservatism in extremist form.

That's bullshit, and he knows it.

What he is actually recoiling at is a Dorian Gray moment. What a pity he's too weak to admit what the moment actually says about what he had done and what he has become.  

Balls Of Brass...

There's something creepy about someone so divorced from reality (and so lacking in self-awareness) that - given his own personal (and public) history - he could write something like this:

Unbelievable. The Republican Party’s pathetically inept new website actually cost them more than a million dollars to set up: Entering digital age an expensive proposition for GOP.

And for that $1.4 million, they got a website that crashed continuously on its launch day, had almost no real content, was mocked across the blogosphere, allowed trolls and Ron Paul idiots to post antisemitic images, and violated several basic principles of good web design. Excellent work, GOP.

Who said it? Why none other than the pre-eminent expert on designing shitty web sites, one Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.

That's right, this from the guy who designed the original Pajamas Media web site, which was, if one cares to remember, universally panned for its drab, industrial, shades-of-gray, straight-out-of-the-officially-approved-Bulgarian-Communist-Party-Book-Of-Design look.

That's right, the web site that had multiple differing signature Pajamas Media logos, a feed from the official news agency of Communist China as well as a wealth of bugs and dead-end links and menu options.

Oh, and by the way, rumor has it that one of the many reasons Charles was shown the door at Pajamas Media was due to the fact that he managed to pick a turkey of a platform for said web site... One that had to be scrapped in order to get to the new (and very mediocre) Pajamas Media design.

While I have no doubt the GOP has truly fucked up what should have been a relatively elementary task, it is worth noting that Charles Johnson mocking anyone for bad web design is like the owner of the Cleveland Browns mocking the owner of the St. Louis Rams for having a really bad football team.

A Somewhat Lengthy Expression Of My Lack Of Sympathy...

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. 

Influence, Angst and Charles Johnson...

Most me are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.  - Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Well, well, well...

It seems Charles Johnson has really pissed off the wrong person. If Roger L. Simon (Da Raj) found his batshit crazy nemesis in me, it seems Charles has found his in journalist Robert Stacy McCain. What is even more delightful, at least to yours truly, is that McCain appears to be willing to take this blog war all the way... Which is just the way I like it.

Let's face facts: If there isn't blood on the floor by the end of a blog war, somebody isn't doing their job.

And as far as I'm concerned, it couldn't be happening to a nicer guy. As most of those of you who have paid attention already know, I really didn't have enough regard for Charles Johnson to spend much time cleaning his clock back in 2005. As Da Raj was the mouthpiece for Pajamas Media, Charles didn't, in and of himself, present nearly the target Raj did. In addition, I didn't go after Charles was simply because it was clear to me that Raj was the one calling the shots, and one of those shots was the decision to screw me. Had I thought Charles the instigator of my Pajamas Media double-cross, things would have been different.

Now it seems Charles Johnson has gone a bit loopy. He's cut ties with just about all his old friends, embraced several old enemies and fallen into the habit of conducting massive purges at Little Green Footballs. It's to the point that several of his old friends are worried about his mental health, thinking that perhaps Charles is on the verge of blowing his brains out. Of course, it is entirely possible that Charles has lost his mind, and it is entirely possible that he might try to blow his brains out tomorrow, but I say don't worry...

Charles would have to be an incredibly good shot to be in any real danger.

What is more likely the cause of Charles Johnson's trip to la-la land is the combination of good, old-fashioned middle-aged male angst and a profound misunderstanding of how the political blogosphere actually works.

When I met Charles, back in 2004, he was fiftyish and driving a somewhat battered Hyundai. According to Raj, he'd been cleaned out in recent divorce and didn't have much more than that Hyundai, his computer and his bike. That's got to be a tough thing to take at fifty. It is probably fair to say that Little Green Footballs and the blogosphere were about the only things Charles had going for him. Which is, quite frankly, somewhat sad.

Sad, and dangerous.

Dangerous because it gave Charles Johnson, middle-aged mediocrity, the out he needed when it came to dealing with the fact that he was just another average guy. It's something that the vast majority of us have to deal with at some point in our lives. We spend our first forty or so years believing that we are indeed special, that we can indeed do anything we want to (if only we work hard for it). It's what's been drilled into us since birth. And then, one day, we wake up and realize that we aren't special. We cannot do whatever we put minds to. We discover we are mediocre. We are average.

What's important to note about this, at least as it applies to Charles Johnson, is that the notoriety gained from the Rather Affair, combined with popularity of Little Green Footballs has allowed Charles the opportunity to avoid, up until about a year ago, the day he had to reckon with his own mediocrity. He could look past his personal and professional setbacks and gaze upon the glory that was blogospheric prominence. If nothing else, he could now claim to being an influencer... Someone of importance... A leader.

And herein lies the seeds of Charles Johnson's self-destruction: He is not a leader. He's an average guy.

I'd be the last person to claim I know Charles Johnson well. I spent parts of two days around the man back in 2004. But, brief as it was, my contact with him allowed me to size him up in certain respects. What those two days told me, more than anything, was that Charles Johnson was not a leader of men. His bearing did not catch the eye or command respect.  Had he been more than average, he might have been able to leverage his Rathergate and LGF success. But as it turned out, cable TV gave him some time and found him wanting. Pajamas Media provided another opportunity, which, if my sources are to be believed, he wasted by playing the disenchanted loner (rather than being a leader).

More important than anything Charles did or did not do, though, was the fact that between 2004 and 2007 we collectively came to understand both the power and the limitations of the political blogosphere. In the heady days of 2003-2004, it was assumed that site traffic conferred, in and of itself, real power to the blogger. That has now been disproved. What we've learned is that it is what the blogger does that confers power. Charles Johnson gained famed not because of his inherent worth as an individual, but because - for one moment in time (Rathergate) - he managed to produce a set of facts that had a material impact on political events. Once Charles stopped producing those sort of facts, his fame (and influence) receeded.

That Charles Johnson doesn't understand this is what makes he present circumstance so sad. He's stuck in a 2004 mindset. He looks at his site traffic and cannot understand why people like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer do not defer to him (and his opinions). After all, he has the traffic they don't. I suspect the root cause of Johnson's resentment towards his old pals is based on his firm belief that he should be leading them. Or, more accurately, that they should have understood that he was Charles Johnson and quietly stepped in behind him.

His former friends seem to be equating Charles' continuing 2004 mindset with madness. I think that's a stretch at best and a mistake at the worst. I would suggest he's a confused middle-aged man who is watching his last shot at being something slip away. And, as he is confused as to the what and why, his response is to lash out at those he feels have betrayed him by refusing to toe the Charles Johnson line.

Evidently The Man Has Made Some Enemies...

Jesus H.

And here I was thinking I knew how to piss people off...

Congratulations, Charles. I bow to the master.

Note: Evidently much of this blow-up started in April of this year. Glenn Beck even got involved. And I missed the whole thing. Probably spending too much time on This Week's Amanda Sentence. Either that or I must not be as insanely and obsessively bitter as I was supposed to be.

Update: I just saw these. Pammycakes has been busy!

Angling For That Juicy Slot At Huffington Post...

Considering the source, this is one of the most bizarre things I've read in a long, long time:

The anti-Islam blogs have been hyperventilating for months over the case of Rifqa Bary — a Muslim teenager who converted to Christianity, ran away from home, and found a new home with a radical fundamentalist Christian preacher, Blake Lorenz of the “Global Revolution Church.”

People like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have injected themselves into this case, judged her parents, and found them guilty of intended murder — because they’re incapable of imagining that Muslim parents might not be murderous monsters. In their twisted paranoid world, all Muslims are honor killers, and that’s all there is to it. Evidence be damned. If her parents say they love her and would never hurt her ... well, that’s just what a lying Muslim would say, isn’t it?

Can you guess who wrote that? Charles Johnson. Charles "Kill 'em all" Johnson.

I've never spent much time reading Little Green Footballs, so over the past several years Charles has evidently morphed from wild-eyed anti-Muslim bigot to fearless defender of Islam. As far as I know, Charles has never explained this rather strange transformation. Of course, it could be genuine. It could also simply be another way to pick fights and draw attention to himself. It is, after all, worth noting that Johnson can't write his post without attempting to engage at least some of his enemies (in this case Geller and Spencer).

Charles Johnson didn't lose his influence when he joined PJM, as some have suggested. He lost his influence when normal, rational people started reading his blog. They saw what he was, what he was about, and they left forever... Leaving Charles with a large, unsavory crew of haters and a few recurring paranoid fantasies. Once it dawned on Charles that (a) PJM wasn't going to make money, and (b) anti-Muslim hysteria wasn't going to last forever, he starting casting about for a new way to recapture his influence. It appears he's settled on the Andrew Sullivan grovelling former apostate model.  

It won't work.

Why Is This Coming As A Surprise?

Well, it seems a number of people are coming to the conclusion that Charles "The Poodle" Johnson is both (a) dumber than a box of dead crabs, and (b) batshit crazy. Why they are coming to this conclusion now is something of a mystery... If memory serves, four years ago I was telling anyone who would listen that Charles was a bigot with a brain the size of a walnut. Evidently much of what I said was discounted because Charles, along with asshole deluxe Roger L. Simon, was promising to make everyone rich.

Or perhaps it's just because I sometimes come across as insanely bitter...

Anyway, it seems Charles has fallen into the habit of picking fights with anyone and everyone that used to be part of the Pajamas Media crowd. Over the past year or so he's fought with the entirety of the Pajamas Media stable of "Muslims are gonna kill us all" bigots like Pam "Pammycakes" Geller, Robert Spencer and others over who is - and who isn't - an acceptable anti-Muslim bigot.

Charles is sensitive like that.

Anyway, it seems Charles has finally started getting on the nerves of his old pals. Not, mind you, because of his bigotry. Hell no. He's getting the heave-ho because he's no longer towing the Republican/anti-Obama Line. As Scott Johnson of Powerline put it when he decided to de-link Little Green Footballs:

We long ago stopped reading LGF Suffice it to say (suffice it for me to say, anyway) that Charles's political inclinations and interests now diverge widely from our own.

Anti-Muslim bigotry is fine, Charles, but you'd best not be soft on Obama. Left-wing deviationism will not be tolerated. Of course, tolerance has never been Charles' strong suit... He's been busy purging his ranks for a couple of years now.

Now Charles has decided to pick a fight with some journalist named Robert Stacy McCain by accusing him of racism. I have no idea who McCain is, and really couldn't give a flying fuck what he is. I'd just note that the idea that anyone in their right mind would take that sort of accusation seriously - coming as it does from one of the internet's pre-eminent anti-Muslim bigots - is enough to make my head spin. So if you're just coming to the conclusion that Charles Johnson has gone nuts, I suggest you take a good, hard look in the mirror. And for those of you who are surprised by this, I would only ask "Why?"

More Awfulness At Pajamas TV...

First Da Raj ran out and hired himself Joe the Plumber, thinking this is the sort of thing people would cough up money for. What we discovered was this: A background in plumbing probably doesn't develop much of the skill set a successful journalist needs.

Then Da Raj ran out and hired him a negro to make fun of Barack Obama, thinking this is the sort of content people would pay for (especially once the Joe the Plumber craze died). What we discovered was this: Alfonzo Rachel is to comedy what Joe the Plumber was to journalism.

Now Da Raj is foisting some boob named Steven Crowder on the unsuspecting, in hopes of getting them to part with their hard-earned cash. What you will discover here is this: Steven Crowder is even more unfunny  than Alfonzo Rachel, which is saying something.

What seems clear is this: It's time to buy Da Raj some paper slippers, a dribble cup and a lobster bib, 'cause he's out of it. Really out of it.

And Remember, This Guy Is A Professional Writer...

Noted businessman, journalist, born-again believer and Iranian hit squad dodger Roger L. Simon is also a legal scholar. Who knew?

Anyway, here's the first paragraph of Da Raj's take on the Sotomayor nomination:

No doubt Sonia Sotomayor’s obscure appearance on a Duke University panel will be one of the video hits of the Internet this week and possibly for a few weeks to come. It should be. What’s interesting - and revealing - about the video is the collusive laughter between Sotomayor and the audience about legislating from the bench - something Obama assured us in his introduction of the jurist she does not do. Maybe Sonia should try stand up.

Man, can that son-of-a-bitch write, or what?

Question the First: How does one have an "obscure appearance"? I'll just bet what Da Raj meant was that Sotomayor made an appearance on an obscure Duke University panel. Just a guess on my part, though...

Question the Second: What exactly is "collusive laughter"? How does one distinquish "collusive laughter" from "non-collusive laughter"?

Maybe it's time to start a "This Week's Roger L. Simon Sentence". Or is that more abuse than even you, my hardy readers, can cope with?

Wherein Roger L. Simon Scares And Bores Himself At The Same Time...

From deep thinker, born-again believer and Iranian hit squad dodger Roger L. Simon:

What scares me most about Barack Obama is the narcissism/megalomania. It’s a consistent theme throughout his life with which I (first introduction of the “I” word) could bore you to death.

That's right, Roger L. Simon bitching about someone else's narcissism/megalomania. Pot? Meet Kettle.

Question: If something really scares you, how can it bore you at the same time?

It's bad enough that Da Raj can't do enough fact checking to get the name of a murdered journalist correct in his big tome on finding God. Now, however, he's to the point where he can't write two sentences without contradicting himself.

Oy.