Remember when Michelle Malkin was nosing around Graeme Fost’s house inspecting his countertops? Charles C. Johnson carries on the tradition of stalkerish behavior:
After a pitstop for an Italian dinner on Tuesday night, right-wing agitator Charles C. Johnson showed up at what he thought was the residence of his biggest online adversary — a man who just so happens to share his name — and snapped photos of himself standing outside the complex’s gate holding conspiracy theory bumper stickers.
Johnson said he retrieved the address to the Pacific Palisades apartment online.
“At the world headquarters of Little Green Footballs…” Johnson tweeted, appending a hashtag to signify his latest obsession.
Little Green Footballs, of course, is the online home of blogger Charles Johnson. But the apartment shown in the tweet hasn’t been his actual home for more than 10 years.
“Actually, when I first saw it I didn’t recognize the place because I haven’t lived there for so long,” Johnson of Little Green Footballs told TPM on Wednesday. “I thought he was just making a joke at first and I looked at it again and realized that’s the place I used to live.”
The conservative Johnson, who’s kicked up dust during the last several months in an attempt to put his stamp on seemingly every news cycle, told TPM in an email that the stunt was meant as a bit of humorous revenge.
“The lesser Charles Johnson encouraged his followers to stalk me for daring to report the name of the Ebola nurse, Nina Pham, 12 hours before the rest of the media,” the founder of the fledgling GotNews.com said in the email. “He’s kind of crazy and I’ve talked to law enforcement about what can be done about his sending stalkers my way. Showing up at his apartment complex door was intended as something of a joke. I knew he would go nuts on Twitter all night, which he promptly did.”
These people are certifiable.
Chyron HR
Your story is too confusing. Change one of the character’s names and try again.
Wait, these are REAL PEOPLE?
Corner Stone
It’s the whole damn shop. MSNBC has a reporter staked out front of Kaci Hickox door, live reporting on when she and her boyfriend left the house to go on a bike ride. Craig Melvin then solemnly talked to three separate people about what this meant.
Jeebus cracker, people.
Corner Stone
And that clip of Gov Christie telling that man to sit down and shut up makes me angrier every time I see it.
Gin & Tonic
@Corner Stone: The Today show fellated him for it.
Sherparick
He is getting his 15 minutes of fame! After all:, “What is best in life?” “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!” In his Nerdy little way this is what drives “Charles C. Johnson” in his delusional world. Also explains “Gamersgate.”
debbie
@Corner Stone:
Just goes to show, people always show you who they really are.
chopper
dogg you got more projection than the cineplex.
beth
@Corner Stone: Yeah there were four talking heads on CNN last night and only one of them thought Christie’s behavior was terrible. The rest just laughed and said that’s just his style. I just couldn’t believe they think that’s acceptable behavior for an adult. My kid would be grounded for life if she tried to talk to someone like that.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Gin & Tonic:
One of the reasons why I feel like the claims that his assholishness would do him in nationally is so goddamn bunk. People love anger long as it’s right wing anger, people love assholes as long as they’re the right kind of assholes, and people will see Christie as the right kind of asshole even when he’s the worst kind. Why? Well, he’s not brown and he doesn’t have a D in front of his name, that’s why.
Botsplainer
We leave CNN on in our reception area. Whenever I walk through, there’s rarely footage of an actual event; it’s always some talking head telling us what the stories of the day mean.
This is EVERY FUCKING DAY.
Nylund
While I’m glad LGF moved out of the wingnut den, I can’t forget all those years where LGF was one of the biggest cesspools of crazy rightwing thought on the internet.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Nylund:
The shift kinda mirrors what happened here. I was honestly shocked a couple years before when I realized LGF had made such a shift and now it’s one of the few islands of sanity I can find these days.
Iowa Old Lady
@Corner Stone: I love the way Hickox refuses to sit down and shut up, as Christie would say. She’s my new hero.
Corner Stone
@Iowa Old Lady: I think she’s making an important point, and one that has to be made.
I’m also pleased President Obama is taking thinly veiled shots at people while reinforcing Kaci’s point.
Chris
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
This, exactly.
Betty Cracker
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: I don’t think it’s fair to compare wingnut Cole with wingnut Johnson. Johnson ran a bigoted hate site for years. Good on him for seeing the light, but let’s not pretend he was just a misguided wingnut. He ran a full-on hate site.
merrinc
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Oh, I think it’s even worse than that. Too many on the left are so hungry for a confrontational Dem that they like Christie too. I’ve been working the polls since EV started and yesterday noticed a guy haranguing the county Dem party lady because Kay Hagan isn’t liberal enough. Why doesn’t she stand up for Obamacare? Why don’t the Dems in our statehouse fight back? There was much waving of arms and shouting and gesticulating and it was all quite entertaining until he proclaimed that if Hillary is our nominee in 2016 and the Rs choose Christie, he’ll vote for Christie.
I elected for a bathroom break rather than listening for what passed for his reasoning. I’m so sick of everyone at this point that I’m ready to crawl into a hole.
Punchy
Charles Johnson (dickhead version) is a spittin’ iimage of a young Michael Moore.
Fat, unkempt, shit hairstyle and unable to locate a razor. Yup, Officially Douchebag(TM)
Woodrowfan
Yeah, but Balloon Juice started off as part of the RW “Hot Air” “empire” as well. Then Cole went sane. LGF’s Charles Johnson still can go off the rails at time (esp on Israel) but I am happy he abandoned the right.
but yes, LGF was far, far worse than BJ ever was.
beth
@Corner Stone: The NBC cameraman was interviewed last night (on CNN?) and flat out said that he thinks Christie is playing politics, pure and simple. It’s been heartening to see the medical people and people like him doing the kind of pushback we’ve been wanting the Dems to do.
Joey Maloney
This guy is less competent than Michele Malkin. Let that sink in for a minute.
Original Lee
@Corner Stone: News crews were staking out the high school that banned the Marine dad who went apeshit over his daughter learning about Islam for world history class. The first story that went out was all his side and went viral. Dude physically threatened the school employees he was talking to and persistently refused to grok the difference between learning about and practicing a religion, and that has to have reporters from more than one network “following the story” for several days?!
debbie
@Iowa Old Lady:
From her statements, she’ll definitely stand her ground on this.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: What that means is more hookers and blow for Time Warner execs.
Priorities, man.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Betty Cracker:
Fair enough. It was less about degree and more about both ‘seeing the light’ and flipping diametrically from where they were before. It’s still rather stunning to see LGF calling out the Pam Gellars of the world for what they are these days.
FlipYrWhig
@merrinc: There’s A LOT of this longing for a fight thing on the self-avowed left. It’s to the point where people like Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton are seen as tough-talkin’ fighters — when IMHO neither of them is any more stylistically pugnacious than Obama hisself. And that was of course half the original appeal of Howard Dean, the other half being opposition to the Iraq War.
Villago Delenda Est
@Joey Maloney: This is like atomic theory. The particles keep getting smaller.
Or, perhaps, it’s turtles all the way down.
Gin & Tonic
@Corner Stone: Cole would send a drone to take her out, and then call her the world’s biggest asshole.
Woodrowfan
let us not forget that this vile clown got his start as a RW figure by sneaking into a nursing home to take photos of a woman with dementia as part of a teabagger campaign to smear a rival politician.
Corner Stone
Breaking News: Kaci Hickox & boyfriend go for bike ride in Maine
Was that the chyron on MSNBC just now, or OnionTV?
FlipYrWhig
@Botsplainer:
Yup. That’s the whole channel. And it’s all of Chris Matthews’s career as well. The last time I saw Matthews he was going on about some statement Obama made about Ebola, and why he was saying it then, and in what style, and whether it was helpful politically, and then he asked two other talking heads their opinions of what the purpose was and how well it must have met its purpose or not. It’s all reporting about the perceived perceptions of the public based on what the reporters and pundits assume the public wants to hear. Think about how circular that is. And that’s like 90% of “news” on TV.
Southern Beale
And Kaci Hickox is getting Sandra Fluke’d, too. Which prompted my deep Thought For The Day.
Villago Delenda Est
@Woodrowfan: This is THAT guy?
He’s a couple of orders of magnitude beyond certifiable.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: Can’t be on Onion TV. They’re cover actual news.
Villago Delenda Est
@Southern Beale:
Assumes more than two working synapses in what passes for their brains. A shaky assumption, from available evidence. Oh, yeah, there I go again…
(to avoid confusion, my quote of SB is from her site…do follow her link and get the context for the quote)
John Cole +0
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I was never in league with Gates of Vienna or Pam Gellar. Those people were orders of magnitude more vile than anything I would ever associate with.
Mr. Twister
@Villago Delenda Est: Yes, and he also Tweets pics of himself fondling a handgun.
Botsplainer
@beth:
Yet that is the most vacuous phrase in all of newsdom. What does it even mean?
I’d prefer to call it what it really is – factionalism.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@FlipYrWhig:
I want to believe that the wishes there were simply for more confrontational and upright advocates, people who won’t go jelly spined at the latest RW meme, rather than wishing for straight up asshole bullies like Christie.
Especially considering, like I said, soon as someone like Christie has a D in front of their names, they’re the worst sort of monster destroying political civility as we know it.
@merrinc:
And this is what makes me want to strangle people. So, you want someone who will fight for what you believe in, but are more than willing to vote for an asshole who will fight to oppose every single one of those things because he fights? Even when his fight is punching your beliefs in the face and braying like the bully he is about his superiority? Fuck all, I have my concerns about Clinton in general, but given the choice, I’d still vote for her over an asshole like Christie.
I want my Dems to be strong, but christ all.
Mustang Bobby
@Corner Stone: Wait until she cuts a fart. There’s your BREAKING NEWS.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@John Cole +0:
Again, mea culpa.
It’s been so long since I looked at LGF at its worst that I forgot how bad it was at its worst.
Woodrowfan
@Villago Delenda Est: ack, sorry, wrong blogger. Johnson is the one who claimed incumbent senator Cochran was paying blakc voters, a story that fell apart and is in the courts now. It was a different blogger who did the nursing home scam.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/tea-party-challenge-to-mississippi-gop-vote-relies-on-sketchy-blogger-and-his-paid-source/
danielx
The douche is strong with this one.
Villago Delenda Est
@John Cole +0: One does have to admit though that the “Gates of Vienna” is a somewhat obscure historical reference that most wingtards couldn’t come up with in a million years.
Yoda Dog
This is too low-hanging fruit for this place. The guy is mentally handicapped. He really is, Im not snarking. Not worth our time here, IMneverhumbleO.
He just wants attention. Especially ridicule from us. We’re just playing right into a nincompoops hands..
Villago Delenda Est
@Woodrowfan: Doesn’t matter. Sill way out there in La-La land. In the case of this most recent episode, literally.
Belafon
Actually, it’s worse than you’re reporting, John. Charles C. Johnson has been suspended from Twitter twice for tweeting the addresses of a nurse who contracted the disease and the address of Duncan’s fiancee. I can’t go hunting on twitter, but one of his comments was that we could have saved so many lives in the 80s had we published the addresses of those with AIDS.
Edited to correct a word.
Snarki, child of Loki
Two RWNJs with the same name? In a feud?
Just wait until they escalate by SWATing each other.
Popcorn time!
Villago Delenda Est
@Mustang Bobby: Oh, the ironing is delicious here.
Villago Delenda Est
@Snarki, child of Loki: THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!
Woodrowfan
@Villago Delenda Est: yeah, he is. I saw read once that he bragged how his grandmother forced him to listen to Rush Limbaugh when he was a little kid, so he was clearly abused and brain damaged.
@Snarki, child of Loki: Well, one is a defector from the right..
Patrick
@beth:
The sickening thing here is that the heckler was complaining about the Sandy funds not having been distributed and it had now gone 23 months and he still hasn’t been able to move back to his house. Almost 2 years!
And these idiots on CNN think it is funny. This is why I don’t watch CNN…
Belafon
@Southern Beale: Yep. Chucky C is questioning whether she was ever in Africa.
Villago Delenda Est
@Woodrowfan: OK, that means he was a little kid in the late 80s early 90s then, when the Nazi Blimp was just getting airborne.
danielx
@Southern Beale:
Wait, wait….you’re talking like you think logical/intellectual inconsistency is a concept that wingnuts even recognize, much less concern themselves about.
Shorter: No. This has been another edition of Simple Answers To Simple Questions.
But I hear you…sometimes the only thing that prevents primal screaming on my part after reading some of this shit is the presence of other people.
Belafon
@Snarki, child of Loki: LGF Charles in no longer associated with the right. I know he and John – both passionate people – don’t always agree, but LGF Charles went through a similar conversion.
Patrick
@Corner Stone:
If a single guy does something this creepy, it is called stalking. But if MSNBC does it, it is somehow “news”worthy. I am so glad I have been boycotting cable news for the last few months.
Chris
@Woodrowfan:
LGF was the bible that every Islamophobic wingnut linked to when arguing that We Are At War With Islam, so Exterminate The Brutes. Last time anyone linked me there, it was to a post holding up a bunch of Koranic verses which upon double-checking turned out to be fabricated (you wouldn’t think you’d need to fabricate verses to make a millennia-old Abrahamic religious book look bad, but hey, if you’re going to be a bigot, you may as well go the whole way and write your own Protocols of the Elders of Zion). That website wanted to be Radio Rwanda when it grew up.
I choose to celebrate the happy ending, because if even someone like Charles Johnson could change his spots, there really is hope for everyone. But yeah, I can more than see why other people find it hard to forgive him. So, Cole wasn’t as vile? I believe that. I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who was more vile than CJ at his worst.
MomSense
@John Cole +0:
Ah, you’ve definitely had your vile moments even post conversion but it was just aimed at a mom and her kids so no big deal, right?
Isn’t the point not who was worse before but how people can learn and change and become better?
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: IRRC CJ finally turned when he found out that the Islamophobe community was rubbing elbows with actual Neo-Nazis who fully approved of Hitler’s approach to the “Jewish question”.
It was a bridge too far for him….and he ran back from the edge of the abyss..
PNW_WarriorWoman
Not to be confused with Charles W. Johnson, an associate justice of the Washington State Supreme Court who is running for re-eelction to our state’s Supreme Court and is a wonderful liberal man with a demeanor and style Balloon-Juice readers would love. Too bad Charles C. didn’t show up at the home of Charles W. If that had happened the police could have called and Charles C. would have been hauled off to jail for harassing an officer of the court. That would have been fun.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Belafon: It’s SO HARD to keep track!
Next thing, you’re gonna tell me that the arch-RWNJ blogger “John Cole” has gone “sane” on us, as if that would ever….oh, wait.
Hey, um, you think there might be a cure for rabies someday?
danielx
@Villago Delenda Est:
So let’s see, child in the 80s…could it be that he was a perfect candidate for Operation Yellow Elephant in the early oughts, spearheaded by the 101st Fighting Keyboarders Brigade*? Yet another valiant soldier in the War of Ideas?
*Slogan: We’re all for wars of extermination provided they’re actually fought by other people.
FlipYrWhig
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Oh, yeah, I understand the wish. But I just have my doubts that the combination of combative attitude and liberal politics really can metastasize among the public and the punditocracy the way combative attitude and conservative politics often has (think Christie, think McCain). Because what the media likes about this particular strain of conservative loudmouth is also his seeming moderation and/or clashing with his own side on some issues. But what people on the left want is combativeness and no moderation. The media doesn’t like that at all; they like it much better when politicians are heterodox. The only combative liberal they’d ever like was a combative liberal who challenged his or her own side–which is almost a self-negating proposition. Without media boosters, actually-existing and theoretically-existing combative liberals will always hit a ceiling, IMHO, that’s much lower than the one for combative conservatives.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
That’s my understanding as well. But even my first reaction when I found that out was “… wait, this was NEWS to you?” Anyone with a passing knowledge of European politics can tell you that the people preaching loudest and proudest about “Eurabia” and the brown menace were the neo-Nazis and other assorted Holocaust deniers, and that if you’re going to a European conference on that theme, that’s who you’re going to run into. All right, fine, not everybody’s half-French, but still…
The story I’d heard about his conversion had one more step to it, actually: that after the conference, he came home and told his audience about it, basically saying “look, I hate the hajjis too, but we gotta be careful who we associate with, okay?” Then he discovered that most of his audience didn’t believe him and thought he was slandering the good name of fellow warriors against Allah, or straight up didn’t care. And that was the point when he finally realized “holy shit, these people are totally fucking gone. I really have been working for fascists.”
Which is one reason why, like I said, I choose to celebrate the happy ending: because there are quite a few wingnuts for whom, if they’d been in his shoes, even that experience still wouldn’t have been enough to jolt them awake.
Frankensteinbeck
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
If national pundits represented America, Romney would be president.
@John Cole +0:
‘Gates of Vienna’. Hoo, boy. I’m familiar with the historical reference, and anybody who names themselves after it must be racist as all fuckety-fuck-fuckeroo.
shelley
To feel big and important, you have to have (or create) big, important enemies. Isn’t it a pain when they couldn’t care less about you?
****************
A slight change of topic: Chopper’s wonder account of John and Shaun’s adventure. I just realized; he forgot to mention Holly’s nurse, Fluffy Bunny!
Tiny Tim
What isn’t (but should be) obvious to people is that anti-Semites hide their anti-Semitism by “supporting” Israel. They do love those Jews, as long as they’re in a far off land…
Frankensteinbeck
@FlipYrWhig:
The Village Media are Republicans who want to claim they’re too sophisticated to belong to a party. Their mavericks and both sides do it and love of straight-shooters and Obama must lead and bipartisanship and so on and so on all fit that model perfectly.
gene108
@beth:
Hard stances / language that sets the political narrative do not come from politicians, they come from their surrogates in the media. The Republicans have flooded the media with their surrogates.
The best Democrats have is the MSNBC prime-time line-up, which sometimes goes into Democrats suck, too territory.
10 years ago, no Republican politician ever said “Liberals hate America”. That meme was pushed by the media hacks. Hell, Bush, Jr. never explicitly said Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11/01, but boy did the media push that narrative.
Very little of the nastiest mudslinging actually comes from Republican politicians. Their surrogates in the media try to set the narrative and they just step in with a well worded statement that offers deniability from the mudslinging, i.e. “though I believe in my heart of hearts my colleague, on the other side of the aisle, when he says he has never beaten his wife, I think the question ‘when did he stop beating his wife’ is a valid one that America needs to have investigated further.”
Violet
@Iowa Old Lady:
Mine too. She’s awesome. I hope she continues doing things a healthy person would do and pursues the legal issues. I hope the medical community is supporting her as well. Loudly. We have to push back against these idiots who run on fear and superstition. Good for her for doing it.
Mandalay
Meanwhile, up in a Canada a couple of James O’Keefe wannabes play out a skit in public where one wears Muslim garb and the other plays an asshole taunting him with offensive comments.
The asshole ends up getting sucker punched hard in the face by a passer by, and told “Get the fuck outta here bud. You’re gonna get fucked up”. The asshole instantly drops the act and bleats “Whoa! Whoa! It’s a social experiment!…”.
Nobody could have predicted this.
kindness
This Twitter thing. How does anyone have the time to keep up? I have a life. Twitter seems to me to be a pseudo Second Life universe. I prefer my real life thank you.
Lady Bug
@Corner Stone:
I haven’t been watching the news much, what did he say?
chopper
@Southern Beale:
The current RWNJ zombie lie is that she didn’t even go to west Africa. It’s all a conspiracy,
g
@Patrick:
Yes, and Christie blustered that it was Christie who was “doing the work” and that the heckler should “roll up his sleeves” and work.
And CNN just elided over the utter dishonesty of this.
g
@chopper: Seriously? LOL!
MomSense
@Violet:
I am enjoying how she is handling this. I do have to wonder if Christie let her leave NJ because he thinks it will help LePage. Christie has done a lot of campaigning here and I think the Republican Governors Association has spent big bucks.
Cutler told his supporters to vote their conscience and King switched his endorsement to Michaud. I would soooo like to win this one so I’m hoping that it works in our favor-which probably makes me a terrible person.
My primary reason for supporting her is that we need to encourage and celebrate the health care professionals who go to Africa to combat Ebola. I’m glad she is making her case against these anti-science bully governors.
Woodrowfan
@Chris: I remember, it was a sewer. What did his followers call them selves, Lizards? something like that. I rather enjoy his attacks on his former allies though.
g
@gene108:
You’re kidding, right? Read the collected works of Michele Bachman, Louie Gohmert, and Ted Cruz, for a sickening litany of personal nastiness, including out-and-out slander verging on treason.
d58826
@Violet: And she has her very own state police escort to make sure she doesn’t infect the asphalt highway.
While Breitbart is usually a cesspool, I thought this article fell into the ‘chickens coming home to roost’ category. Seems that Franklin Grahams charity is having problems getting supplies into West Africa. Now I think Graham is a smuck but his organization is doing good work in the area affected by Ebola. What is also kinda funny is he wants Obama to use goveernment resources to establish an air bridge to Africa.
Belafon
@Mandalay: The guy was expecting people to join him in insulting the Muslim. Getting punched in the face was not part of his precalculated results.
NonyNony
@g:
To be fair – the first of those two are backbenchers whose job in the GOP seems to be to catapult the nastiest craziest shit.
But I’d point to Jesse Helms – who never had a problem uttering the vilest of shit.
Or Joe McCarthy – the patron saint of modern Republicanism.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
I have a suspicion (this goes along with your “sophisticated comment”) that one reason why many of them shun the Republican label is the general stereotype of Republicans as angry rednecks, Jesus freaks and other heartland yokels, all high on their Bibles and Confederate flags and NASCAR races. The Village likes to think they’re more sophisticated than that. And they gush over every “moderate” Republican who seems like he’s above that herd.
Chris
@gene108:
Are you sure it’s not the other way around? Maybe I just watched too much of Republican primaries where they’re all competing for the psycho vote, but it seems to me that nowadays their politicians love to sling the mud themselves. Leaving the media to paper over it with a combo of “he didn’t mean that” and “but it was so leaderlike [swoon]!”
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: Also consistent with being self-hating Democrats. They think speaking to the downtrodden is too-easy demagoguery (i.e., big promises for free goodies and better lives), which negates most populism–that’s the “hard choices” fetish. They dislike effusive Christianity too. They abhor racism. They like “national greatness” and general feel-good-ery, because they think stupid people need to hear it, but they’re also cynical and think no politician really means anything he says. So they embrace Republicans who pick fights and don’t cite Scripture, and who successfully dupe the rubes with bullshit, and the only kind of Democrats they respect are the ones who make it hard to vote for them instead of easy.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Co-sign. They like Republicans who rise above the Bubba stereotype and Democrats who rise above the Fuzzy Peacenik Redistributionist stereotype. And they think they hate pandering, but they also respect those who pander well, so the thing they seem to hate more than anything is clumsy pandering, like John Kerry in hunting gear.
MomSense
@d58826:
The governor actually canceled his campaign events so he could monitor the situation. Huh?? Watch the outside of her house waiting for her to leave?
Gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
What some on the Left want is as delusional as Rightwingrs, who want to take their country back.
They long for a mythical pre-Reagan utopia that can be brought back through some undefined process.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
That is absolutely what I think is true. They believe in all the conservative asshole positions, but want to feel like worldly-wise, mature thinkers.
@FlipYrWhig:
I wish to pick one serious not-really-a-nit here. ‘Tough choices’ is just domestic abuser thinking. It’s ‘This hurts me more than it hurts you.’ Assholes demand to be praised for being assholes, so anyone who shafts the poor like closet Republicans want must be ‘brave’.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah. There’s a weird mix of class prejudice and their own socially moderate beliefs. Like the “dudebro” libertarian stereotype, it’s not that they’re strong believers in gay rights and women’s rights and minority rights, so much as they don’t care about these things, and are liable to get impatient when the heartlanders obsess on these things and treat them like a hill worth dying on. They think these people would be better off focusing on the big and adult things that are really important, like tax cuts and deficit reduction. Of course, the reason they’re more interested in those issues is because they tend to run in wealthier circles than that stereotypical Republican middle class voter. Which brings it back to class.
Yoda Dog
@Gene108: Cuz we all know both sides do it™!!!
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh, definitely. It’s an absurd thing to praise. I think they do it because they internalize a lot of assumptions about what makes politics easy and what makes it hard, and they admire the ones who do what’s hard, whether it harms people or not. It’s kind of like how baseball announcers always like the “scrappy 2nd baseman” who’s a “gamer” and “plays the game the right way,” because it’s just too easy to like the good players with talent.
hamletta
LGF Charles Johnson actually started out as an apolitical blogger. The first time I visited his site, it had to do with Web design and coding shit.
But he lost his mind on 9/11, as did a lot of people. I think he was living in NYC at the time.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
I think they’re a little more conservative than that. Anybody who can blame Obama for the lack of bipartisanship and listen to Brokaw rant about entitlements while nodding at his wisdom has a good streak of racism and outright cruelty.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris:
It’s interesting that I can’t remember ever having heard a pundit or reporter mock a Republican for taking the easy road of promising tax cuts, the way they would mock a Democrat for promising more generous government benefits. The last politician who got any credit for bravery by advocating a tax increase was probably Bruce Babbitt ’88.
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: I chalk those up to the “leadership” fetish and the “hard choices” fetish respectively. I’ve grown to hate the “leadership” thing more than any other aspect of modern-day political analysis.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
@FlipYrWhig:
“Tough choices” is also, you know, a complete load of bullshit when you look at what they apply it to. In a Washington where both parties are absolutely saturated with Wall Street stooges, cutting the already anemic resources allocated to the poor, the sick and the unemployed and giving more presents to the rich in the form of tax cuts is about as far from “tough” as it gets. It’s the easiest possible choice when you know that the rich and the Official Washington network will take good care of you even if the worst case scenario (losing reelection) comes to pass.
Gene108
@NonyNony:
They say some out there things. They do, in my opinion, piggy back on memes from Fox News, but they do not trailblazer talking points.
I think the Left wants Democrats to trailblaze the narrative. That is not gong to come from politicians. Politicians ride social movements to accomplish policy results. They do not spearhead the social movements or the narratives that get put into the mainstream from those movements.
Matt McIrvin
@merrinc: When I hear people spewing that kind of nonsense I comfort myself by looking at polls. Heighten-the-contradictions types make a lot of noise, but very few people actually think that way; Democrats support Democratic politicians; liberals support Democratic politicians. The number of voters who will actually vote Republican because Democrats aren’t left-wing enough is minute verging on nonexistent.
nellcote
Why I Parted Ways With The Right
By Jazzy Ponytail [Charles Johnson AKA LGF]
11/30/09
1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)
2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)
3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)
4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)
5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)
6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)
7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)
8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)
9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)
10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)
And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.
I won’t be going over the cliff with them.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Oh, I do think there’s quite a bit of racism there. I just think it’s a matter of priorities – like I said, that’s not their Hill To Die On.
I read a thread on LGM… months ago, talking about the history of Southern Democrats, where one commenter was arguing (rightly I think) that the Dixiecrats were unified by their racial supremacism, but actually varied quite a bit when it came to economics (which isn’t to say that there weren’t plenty of Dixiecrats who were as radically elitist as any Northern Republican). I think Village elites and the kind of politicians they love are basically that, in reverse. They’ll tolerate eccentricities on social issues, but on economics, they’re all Reaganites.
Cruelty? Oh, yes. Class prejudice goes very well with that.
Matt McIrvin
@hamletta: Before he was even a coding blogger (before there was a Web, let alone blogs), he was a coding hobbyist. The first I ever encountered the phrase “Little Green Footballs” was as his brand name for Atari ST shareware in the 1980s. He wrote an alternative file-browser dialog for the ST’s operating system that was pretty nice.
And, yes, his blog started out apolitical and went around the bend after 9/11. A lot of us had bad politics for a while after 9/11. But he let things ride really far and get shockingly horrible in his comment boards before his heel-face turn. “Hate site” would not be an inaccurate characterization.
FlipYrWhig
@Gene108:
“The Left” thinks that (1) the left is the “base”; (2) the left is large and waiting to be mobilized; (3) messaging/narrative/”framing” is what makes people “left.” I don’t think any of those things are true. That’s why it gets so circular: it becomes “I’m frustrated and here’s what would make me happy, and if I was happy a lot of other people would be happy, and the reason why all of us aren’t happy is that everyone is so corrupt that they refuse to do this obviously popular winning strategy.” Well, you know, a lot of people like bluegrass music, but that doesn’t mean every radio station needs to program bluegrass music for fear of pissing off the bluegrass fans. More people like Katy Perry, so that’s what they play.
Woodrowfan
sometimes there are genuine hard choices to make. Kicking the poor, however, should NOT be one of the choices in the menu. Unfortunately making “hard choices” is now Villagespeak for “which poor people do we screw over today?” not “which Pentagon program is not worth the money invested?”
Villago Delenda Est
@NonyNony: Newt Gingrich. Who provided an entire essay on how to smear Democrats.
John Cole +0
@MomSense: I forget. refresh my memory.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Yep. 88 was a political lifetime ago. Different Washington, still a lot of traces of the liberal consensus era left to be scrubbed clean. I think the Gingrich takeover in 1994 is what really finalized “wired for Republicans.”
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Actually I might say ’88 had a lot to do with our current state of fuckuppery. That was the Atwater campaign for Bush on all the bullshit: Willie Horton, flag-burning, the death penalty, the tank photo-op… A whole lot of nothing, mostly admired for its malevolent chutzpah. That’s what spawned Rove and the permanent campaign. Plus the Hart infidelity stuff, and the Quayle selection. It’s the beginning of the present horrorscape.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Wasn’t a lot of that just continuing on trends that had started with Nixon and Reagan?
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig: ’88 is the main reason why I have a hard time thinking of GHWB as the decent Bush. The bit where he went after Dukakis for supporting a kid’s First Amendment right to not say the Pledge of Allegiance; that really stuck in my mind. It was an easy attack, guaranteed to succeed under the circumstances, but also a completely scummy one.
merrinc
@Matt McIrvin:
I hope you’re right, Matt. But I’m afraid they will stay home instead. We’re going to be paying the price of butthurt Dems sitting out the 2010 election for a long time.
Fingers crossed, though – at least here in NC. We’ve seen EV totals rising daily. We’re less than 7K from surpassing the 2010 midterm general EV totals and we’ve got two full days and 3 hours on Saturday left. Over 11K voted yesterday.
Edited to add: numbers reflect voting in Mecklenburg county, not the whole state.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
The prefer “authentic” assholes. And I don’t know which part they prefer.
FlipYrWhig
@Chris: Fair enough, but IMHO for the first time it was all Teh Stoopid, all the time.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: I agree that many on “the Left” overestimate the popularity of their ideas and the number of their compatriots. But it’s not like all ideas compete on their own merits, not when a congresscritter has to raise $10K a day to retain his or her seat. Money skews the ever loving fuck out of our politics, and any analysis that leaves that out is missing something central.
FlipYrWhig
@merrinc:
Eh, that’s not who didn’t turn out in 2010–it was people who liked Obama more than they liked Local Generic Democrat. It gives the butthurt too much credit. They didn’t make anything happen. All that happened was the same off-year story, only with a boost in cranky white oldsters shaking their canes at Obamacare.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: True, but at a certain point none of that can happen unless you keep getting enough votes to win. They do things for their donors but they speak to their constituents, unless they’re willing not to be reelected. So that’s the circle they’re always trying to square: donor service with constituent comfort and acceptability at least, popularity at best.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, but if you have enough money to buy media outlets, you don’t have to do fuck-all to serve your constituents — you can just lie with impunity. The DFHs have a point about corruption, and the idea that America is what it is because people have made an honest assessment of what’s on offer and chosen accordingly is incomplete at best. There’s not a fair marketplace of ideas; stacks of cash ensure the Left’s product gets a “Now with more Ebola!” label slapped on it.
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: I don’t think there’s a _fair_ marketplace of political ideas, but it’s still a lot like a marketplace. You’re not starting from scratch. People already have tastes and nebulous feelings and are actually pretty hard to shake. Making them like something else is extremely difficult. Quality alone doesn’t do it. Righteousness definitely doesn’t do it. And that’s why all the framing/narrative/etc. thumb-sucking that we do in the blogosphere rings so false. Politicians talk the way they talk in no small part because they’ve calculated, down to a science, how much it appeals to people in key demographics. They do what they do for other reasons, and believe what they believe for others besides, but that’s why they talk how they talk. If they’re not talking to you, it’s because they don’t think there are enough people like you for that to matter. And when we backseat-drive their strategy, we need to consider the possibility that they’re right.
Another Holocene Human
@PNW_WarriorWoman: That would have been delicious because Chuck Johnson ran out on a subpoena from Mississippi.
Chuck Johnson is a problem because he makes shit up, that passes to Hoft, that passes to Drudge, and then it passes to Fox or other RW news sites. He’s a conduit for Ron-Paul-Newsletter paranoid made up shit that gets reported as news a few hours later. He’s been doing this kind of RW baiting since high school (he went to a private high school in Massachusetts and it seems like most of the student body didn’t care for his shtick, from what one can gather from news reports–yes, he caused so much ish there were news reports).
EthylEster
JC wrote:
Um…which people exactly. Can’t keep up.
Betty Cracker
@FlipYrWhig:
If what you’re saying is “Blue Dogs gotta Blue Dog,” I agree. If you’re saying, “This is a center right nation,” bollocks!
FlipYrWhig
@Betty Cracker: It’s not a center-right nation, but there are A LOT of center-right pockets, and many fewer left-of-(center-left) pockets. So strategies predicated on rallying liberals are a lot less promising than a lot of the blogosphere seems to think. That’s all I mean.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: When people say this is or is not a center-right nation, the crucial question is “relative to what?”
When political writers say it, they usually mean the US is center-right relative to the Republican/Democratic divide, which is just wrong, and probably comes from over-interpreting the distortions induced by the federal system, the more consistent voting of elderly white people, and stuff that happened 30 years ago.
But relative to the Democratic Party’s progressive-activist wing? Relative to North European social democrats? Of course it is.
seefleur
@MomSense: Well, in fairness to LePlague, it’s much nicer up in northern Maine at this time of year than it is in Disgusta.
Matt McIrvin
@merrinc: It does drive me up the wall when libertoonians post something online about how Demopublicans are all the same and both parties are trying to screw you and voting is worthless, and then a bunch of lefties pipe up in agreement as if they don’t realize the trap they’re walking into or the things they’re implicitly agreeing to.
Jamey
Somebody needs to tell Chuckles to stop looking like the spawn of Eric Wareheim and Erick Erickson
Southern Beale
@chopper:
OH I GET IT:
1- Pretend to go to West Africa to help poor sick people.
2- Get put in a quarantine tent by Chris Christie on return.
3- ????????
4- PROFIT!
Is that about right?
MCA1
@Belafon: That was interesting to watch, and made me temporarily feel better about the human race. Or Canadians, at least. One would assume that if they’d gotten footage of people joining in the thuggery, they would have shown it.
Still, I think it’s different when one sees a specific individual being openly taunted and insulted in public. It’s easier to step in and say something under those circumstances, than it is to tell someone they’re being an asshole in a smaller setting when they’re just talking in general, and not directly assaulting another specific human.
That said, it could have gone the other way and these guys accidentally incited a mob that beat the crap out of the one dressed in Muslim garb. So, there’s that. Crowd dynamics are pretty unpredictable, but in this instance the crowd decided to defend the innocent man. Maybe all it takes is one person to do the right thing and people will get the courage to stand up to the bully collectively.
Ken_L
Well I have to say the LGF Johnson’s response was almost as immature and self-obsessed as the other guy’s provocation. The kind of episode that turns normal people off internet political discourse altogether.