The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Cult of Degenerates’

Posted on | December 24, 2010 | 20 Comments

“Though his little LGF like cult of degenerates, ‘Men’s’ movement sissies and neo-nazis, (sorry, I mean ‘neo-Confederates’) probably don’t because like any gathering of losers who invest their lives in some guy they take his word as gospel. And Stacy McCain is, among other things, a liar.”
— Rob Taylor, “Stacy McCain Knows I Didn’t Compare Him to John Wayne Gacy,” Greenville Dragnet

He has published an e-mail exchange we had Dec. 8, after I had seen the article attacking me that Taylor published at NewsReal. Go read the whole thing, and if anyone has any reasonable questions, I’ll be glad to answer them, but I’m pretty sure you’ll spot Taylor for the embittered third-rate ax-grinder he is.

Taylor’s comparison of this blog to Little Green Footballs is . . . well, laughable, yes, but also most interesting. In making the comparison, Taylor reveals that his grievance against me goes back more than a year.

Taylor links to a post he published in Sept. 27, 2009 (in the immediate aftermath of the Great LGF Flame War) titled: “Hate Mail! Neo-Confederate Stacy McCain Groupie Calls Me Depraved Chickenhawk“:

The supreme irony of this current round of the Little Green Pogrom is that all the people who sat idly by while Charles Johnson slandered some very good people are suddenly finding themselves the target of Johnson’s hate cult. Perhaps unwilling to build the bridges they burned while tacitly supporting Johnson’s outrageous attacks, many of those people are looking for allies in all the wrong places. Case in point, Robert Stacy McCain . . .

You can read all of that, too, for all I care. I don’t remember ever having seen that post before. Why? Because when it was published, I’d already declared my intention to go to Kentucky to report on the death of Census worker Bill Sparkman.

By late September 2009, I’d finished saying what I had to say about LGF and — thanks to contributors to the Shoe Leather Fund — begun doing what I like best, exclusive reporting. And barely a week after I returned from Kentucky, I started covering the Doug Hoffman campaign in NY-23. All the bitterness engendered by Charles Johson’s attack on me receded in the rear-view mirror, and I was blissfully unaware of the existence of an avowed enemy named Rob Taylor.

Flash-forward, then, to October 2010, when Taylor made his first contribution to NewsReal and provokes a flame war with Amy Miller. He immediately associated her with “the ‘sex offender advocacy’ movement.” Responding to this attack, Miller replied:

“[S]top trying to divine the intent behind my question by impugning my intellectual integrity and arbitrarily throwing me in with a man you clearly despise.”

In that one sentence, Miller nailed Taylor’s modus operandi. He imagines himself capable of divining the intent of others, he impugns their integrity, and then categorizes and labels them.

Name-calling and guilt-by-association are no substitute for argument. The blogosphere is not the Oxford Union, and just about everyone commits logical fallacies and/or rhetorical abuses that would be scored as a foul by a high-school forensics contest judge. (Being a connoisseur of invective myself, I recognize this for what it is: If you’re going to cut a man, eviscerate him, I say.) 

However, the Marquis of Queensbury Rules don’t apply in a bar brawl. If the guy you just sucker-punched turns out to be a Hell’s Angel — and if a couple dozen of his biker buddies are hanging out at the bar with him — there’s only one person to blame when you get stomped half to death.

Taylor had evidently been burning with resentment toward me since September 2009, and my dust-up with Jill Filipovic over the Assange case afforded him the opportunity to attack.

Like I said, “Nobody’s fault but mine.”

Taylor’s well-deserved insignificance would have made that attack useless if he’d done it from his own blog, so instead he used David Horowitz’s NewsReal blog as the vehicle of his vengeance.

Rule 4 (“Make Some Enemies“) probably needs to be updated with a codicil: “Choose your enemies wisely.”

Chlanna nan con thigibh a so’s gheibh sibh feoil!

UPDATE: Someone called attention to a passage in Taylor’s response to me (where he quotes an e-mail he sent that I never bothered to open), asking if I have “ever read Anton LaVey’s essay on misogyny? It posits that misogynists are all closeted homosexuals who hate women because secretly they desire the attention of men and can’t compete with the women, especially one who is overtly sexual. . . . I have a similar theory about rape apologists I call the Tennessee Williams syndrome. That said, I’m married so your wasting your time.”

Hello? He’s gay-baiting me? And quoting Anton LaVey as his authority? Is he or is he not calling me (a) misogynist, (b) rape apologist and (c) closeted homosexual?

Category: Blogging, Rule 4

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