Pirate's Cove

Like most, I rarely bother with this beyond moonbat unhinged tool, but, this story is too funny to ignore. He probably thought the story would be all nice about him, but, nope! The Times is about a day late 8 months late and a dollar short regarding the blog war that occured between Charles Johnson and the sane people in the Right-o-sphere, but, they give it a try in an article entitled Right-Wing Flame War! After some flowing rhetoric, we find out that Charles thinks he is the best thing since sliced bread

I’ve always been kind of a voracious reader, and when I saw the attack happen, I was probably one of the first ones to make a connection with Osama bin Laden, who’d declared war on America a few years earlier. It was like a huge light bulb going on over my head about this stuff, and I wanted to really learn about it, so I started posting everything I could find.”

[Insert Dr. Evil saying “riiiiiiiiiiiight” here]

…Johnson quickly turned Little Green Footballs (or L.G.F., as it is commonly known) into one of the most popular personal sites on the Web, and himself — the very model of a Los Angeles bohemian — into an avatar of the American right wing.

He did a good job of faking most right wing issues, but, of course, as we all know, that started changing in 2007, and he went full moonbat in 2008, when half his posts were about creationism. He finally went full Anakin Skywalker when he removed the moonbat protecting a jihadi header graphic sometime after Obama won the general election.

But, the love from the Times didn’t last long

Now it is eight years later, and Johnson, who is 56, sits in the ashes of an epic flame war that has destroyed his relationships with nearly every one of his old right-wing allies. People who have pledged their lives to fighting Islamic extremism, when asked about Charles Johnson now, unsheathe a word they do not throw around lightly: “evil.”

Actually, I think the correct term is “unhinged tool.” “Barking moonbat” also works, as does “raving psychotic.”

“It’s just so illogical,” 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?”

Hmm, I think Charles Johnson is going to ban the NY Times from his site

If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse.

But, I’m sure Chuck takes no responsibility for those comments. Guilt by association is only in play on other sites, not his. I bet the folks at the Grey Lady are having issues accessing LGF at this time, since Charles probably blocked their main IP address, as he has done to others.

The Times then does a good job in explaining how Chuck went insane, and started attacking Pam Geller and Robert Spencer. I’d suggest popping over to Jihad Watch for a bit more discourse from Robert himself. The Times even calls what Chucky did “borderline ridiculous.” And, it doesn’t get much better

Johnson broke off relations with blogs that claimed openly to owe their own existence to him. He called the syndicated columnist Diana West and the investigative reporter Richard Miniter fascist sympathizers. He threatened to take down Michelle Malkin. In some ways, it was an exploration of the limits of his own influence: all over the blogosphere, you were either with him or with the fascists.

Remember, this is a guy who is so delusional that he has programs that monitor if someone said something about him somewhere on the ‘Net. In real time.

THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson’s tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this casual flinging of epithets like “fascist” wasn’t maybe an overreaction. Johnson’s response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. “Get off my Web site” was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true — that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him — but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others’ records against his.)

Hmm, how’s that love from the Left going, Charles? Do you hang with Cindy Sheehan and Scott McClellan now, as they wallow in their beer once the Left used them up? Basically, the Times just called Charles a massive liar.

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.”

Charles is probably threatening to call his lawyers about now.

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.

How soon will Kilgore Trout hop over into Times Land and sock puppet, leaving all sorts of nasty and racist comments, as he did to Hot Air?

To wrap up, I’d say Chuck thought this would be a good article, but, man, they end up abusing him. It’s no shock that he whines back at the Fish Wrap. And there are tons of nasty comments aimed at the Grey Lady. As they say, regarding the Times story, read the whole thing. It is a good breakdown of what occurred from an impartial (weird saying that about the NY Times!) party.

Others: Power Line, The Other McCain, And So it Goes in Shreveport, Jihad Watch, Atlas Shrugs, Achenblog, QandO, Riehl World View, Gateway Pundit and Tim Blair

Ace: A funny thing happened on the way to [The Times] publishing it, though. They discovered [Charles is] kind of a dick.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU