Category: Atlas Shrugs

Pamela Geller Loves a U.S. Marine

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Which is just one reason why she endorsed Rick Barber:

Rick makes reference to America’s founding as a Christian nation, to “the freedoms given to us by God, our Creator.” Pamela offers to lead “Jews for Barber” and refers to what she wrote about Democrats’ “protect the brand” strategy.

Yesterday was Rick’s birthday, and there’s a bonus here for anyone banned at Little Green Footballs: Every time you donate to Rick Barber for Congress, an angel gets his wings — and Charles Johnson dies a little bit inside.

CPAC: Pamela Geller And Robert Spencer Strike Again

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by Smitty

In the Rock Star Blogger pantheon, few exceed Pamela and Robert for lasting impact.

It’s one thing to carve out a blog, and quite another to do something like bring Geert Wilders to CPAC 2009. What do these two do for an encore? The Freedom Defense Initiative.

This blog in particular looks forward to meeting LtCol Allen West as a part of FDI. May Fortune continue to bless the efforts of these two stalwarts.

Also, Pamela just endorsed Rick Barber, and Stacy McCain approves of that message.

‘This Makes Me Want to Build an Ark’

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So says Political Junkie Mom, in reaction to this disturbing news from Pamela Geller:

A new documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, chronicles America’s moral decay. Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, “If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.” In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution.
One girl sums up the new attitudes: “Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”

Presumably the price is higher for ugly dudes, but when there’s so much available for free, you’ve got to figure a guy who’s paying $100 isn’t a GQ model, eh?

This is “Reason to Homeschool #9999” for Political Junkie Mom, who needs to enhance her blogroll, IYKWIMAITYD.

UPDATE: Any economist would see the market mismatch here:

The 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day was lonely and sexually repressed, according to messages left on an Islamic website. . . .
But, like the September 11 bombers, who visited strip clubs before their date with destiny, when his devout religious beliefs conflicted with his corporeal desires, he found that blowing himself up along with a whole lot of infidels was preferable to being sexually frustrated.
As the New York Post put it: “The bomb wasn’t the only thing burning in his pants.” . . .
Perhaps the best psychological explanation comes from United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, the recent book by Jamie Glazov, the managing editor of FrontPage Magazine. . . .
He claims there is an “Islamist war on private love [which] derives most of its energy from a deep-seated misogyny. Women’s empowerment, independence and self-determination, especially the sexual variety, pose a threat to Islamism’s very existence.” . . .

The solution? The U.N. International Oral Sex Clearing House (UNIOSCH). It would work kind of like Al Gore’s carbon-credits scheme, to match men from nations that were suffering an oral sex deficit with women from countries that have an oral sex surplus. So the kind of chick who is currently selling oral sex for $100 in Canada would be reassigned by UNIOSCH to Nigeria or Pakistan or Yemen where her services would help relieve the jihadi rage.

It’s a classic win-win, because it would not only reduce Islamfascist terrorism but also improve morality in the West. Just imagine the mother-daughter conversations:

“Hey, Mom, can I go hang out the mall?”

“OK, but behave yourself. You don’t want to end up like your sister Jennifer.”

“Right. Have you heard from Jennifer lately?”

“Yeah, the UNIOSCH is sending her to Cairo.”

“Why Cairo?”

“Well, she’s already done every guy in Islamabad twice, so . . .”

And who would be in charge of this important United Nations peace initiative? Bill Clinton.

UPDATE II: We just got the Ace-o-Lanche from the AOSHQ headlines, but I’m thinking Ye Olde Merry Band of Morons will demand a separate thread to discuss this story. Obviously, there are issues here that need to be discussed in a non-PG13 forum.

For example, isn’t $100 way above the going street-price for oral sex? Of course, most of that market supply involves skanky meth addicts, but in that kind of transaction, who cares? You’re paying for skill, right? And my guess is that an experienced meth-addicted streetwalker would have more skill than a mere teenager. So how is this teenage girl quoted in the story getting $100 from “good-looking” guys?

Ace really needs to have his own post about this.

Little Green Footballs and the ‘Cult of Personality’ Factor in Blogging

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Everybody’s now blogging about the New York Times profile of Charles Johnson. Rather than extend the previous post, I’ll collect the reactions in a new post. This aggregation will be extended and updated until it’s time to deliver The Final Wisdom:

  • One of the more amusing carom-shots of the LGF meltdown is Barrett Brown’s proposal for a CJ-BB collaboration that Dennis the Peasant dubs “Axis of A$$hole” and “Operation F*ck Everyone.” D the P notes that CJ is being disingenuous about whether his 2007 departure from Pajamas Media was (a) “completely amicable,” as he said at the time, or (b) a bitter ideological breach with a “right-wing parrot organization.” We might alternatively hypothesize that it was (c) neither and that CJ just decided to cash out, since he contributed very little to PJM in terms of management or content.
  • Tim Blair of the Telegraph likewise notes that Johnson’s “shrinking support base and paranoid self-obsession seem like an ideal platform from which to launch The Next Big Internet Thing.”
  • Dan Collins at POWIP: “Just for the record, Barrett: I warned you about Charles. . . . In the long run, I think, you’ll regret hitching your fortunes to a falling phaeton.” A warning likely to go unheeded. As Franklin observed, experience keeps a hard school, but a fool will learn in no other.
  • Ace of Spades aridly observes that not even the Strange New Respect factor could prevent the New York Times from reporting the most obvious truth about CJ: “They discovered he’s kind of a dick.”  The AOSHQ commenters have a field day, as might be expected.
  • My friend Dan Riehl criticizes my tactics in engaging CJ. Should I be offended? I’m not. Dan fights his way, I fight mine, and as long as we’re both winning, any criticism between us is like the guys on ESPN doing a postgame analysis. Johnson sought to destroy me and all that matters in a fight for survival is winning the fight. Johnson probably still doesn’t understand how and why he failed, and he displayed his complete befuddlement by naming me twice (sandwiched among such luminaries as Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter) in his final fatwa, “Why I Parted Ways With the Right.”
  • The much larger Johnson, Scott Johnson of Powerline: “I don’t follow Dee’s take on what happened to Johnson, but I think few readers can fail to conclude that Johnson has gone haywire.” This is an astute observation, as Dee’s reporting stops short of deriving any definitive explanation from the facts reported. Dee wisely avoids the error of telling the reader what to think about the controversy, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions — and “gone haywire” is certainly a fair conclusion.
  • Pat Austin in Shreveport: “I’m a relative newbie to the blogosphere and never followed LGF in the first place, so the whole blogwars episode with Johnson wasn’t ever really on my radar.” Indeed, if you arrived in the blogosphere after 2007, you’re not likely to remember when Little Green Footballs really mattered. It’s nonetheless important for newbies to learn from this textbook example of what awful things can happen when Blogger Mood Disorder rages out of control.
  • Patterico faults his own judgment: “I was critical of Charles in several ways, but I think I gave him the benefit of the doubt far too much.” This raises the question of why Patterico gave CJ the benefit of the doubt, but that is a tangent perhaps best left unpursued today.
  • Very interesting contemplation from Blog P.I.: “While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination.” Part of what happened with CJ, it seems to me, is that he succumbed to the belief that everything that can be known is available online, so that what is reported on the Internet about Vlaams Belang (or me) represents a total, definitive and indisputable truth. Ergo, by online research, you can become an “expert” about people you’ve never even met. This is so obviously a fallacy that it is astonishing to think any intelligent person would succumb to it, but CJ did.
  • Blogospheric veteran Michael W. of Q and O adds some historical perspective and concludes: “Poor code monkey. So lonely and misunderstood.” The epithet “code monkey” highlights the fact that CJ’s strength was as a programmer and page designer, and that his excursion into the political arena took him outside his natural metier. That fact strikes me as quite significant. As the blogosphere grew and became more competitive, and as off-the-shelf blog software made technical skills less necessary to the enterprise, CJ was eclipsed by others whose skill-set and background were more suited to political commentary. His resentment at being eclipsed was the bad seed from which sprang the poison fruit of his rage.
  • Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit enjoys Dee’s characterization of LGF as the “Animal Farm of the Blogosphere.” CJ’s totalitarian tendency — the sadistic bent that went unnoticed by conservatives so long as Johnson trained his fire on jihadis and their MSM apologists — was deeply implicated in his meltdown. One moment of startling clarity in last September’s bloggerdammerung was when CJ called Hoft a “borderline illiterate bigot.” If you actually know Jim Hoft, he’s one of the gentlest and most generous souls in the blogsophere. Anyone who would attack Jim is clearly a twisted personality.
  • William Teach at Pirate’s Cove captures the essence of Johnson’s thin-skinned paranoiac tendencies: “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.”
  • Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post humorously avers that, like LGF, his own blog is a Cult of Personality. Lucky dog. Back in the day when I was at The Washington Times, I could never convince my editors to let me run my own Cult of Personality blog on their dime. They laughed at me! Fools! Bwahahahaha!

And now at last, having aggregated like a mofo for more than three hours, I feel The Final Wisdom congealing in my cerebral cortex like Continue reading Little Green Footballs and the ‘Cult of Personality’ Factor in Blogging →

Wow. New York Times Article About Charles Johnson Is Reasonably Accurate

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Unlike the fawning Los Angeles Times column that spoiled my breakfast in Burbank a couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Dee’s article takes time to examine the pivotal episode in the Little Green Footballs meltdown, the 2007 Brussels conference:

It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened. . . .
Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that [Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer] publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them. . . .
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. . . .

Read the rest, and remember that it was in October 2007 that Geller first stood up against Johnson’s bullying.  It was not until November 2008 that I first spoke up in Geller’s defense, and September 2009 when Johnson came after me. If the two weeks when I did battle against LGF seemed to me to stretch out like an endless nightmare, think of what it was like for Geller and Spencer to endure it for months on end.

For far too long, then, Geller, Spencer and a handful of others were pretty much alone against the once-awesome might of Little Green Footballs, and a lot of other people ignored it because it wasn’t in their interest to get mixed up in someone else’s blog war. But there were larger issues at stake, and conservative bloggers would have been wiser to heed the alarm bell when it first rang.

At least Dee’s New York Times article doesn’t buy into Johnson’s self-serving claim of a road-to-Damascus awakening about global warming as the origin of his war on the Right. What happened to Charles was a lot more personal than climate change. His attacks on others were an externalization of his own inner demons — scapegoating and projection — and because he lacked the manhood to confront his failures, he couldn’t back down or admit the possibility of error.

Tuesday night on blogger’s row in Boston, Pamela Geller was seated between Karen Tumulty of Time magazine and Kerry Picket of the Washington Times. When the band played, and the balloons dropped and confetti filled the air . . .

Well, Charles Johnson wasn’t there. He was somewhere else, infinitely and miserably alone.

UPDATE: Graydon Carter hires Barrett Brown?

Somehow, I managed to get myself involved in all of this despite having no real connection to the conservative movement other than enjoying a couple of Ted Nugent songs, or rather just one of them.

“Managed to get myself involved” = belatedly jumped on the dogpile after everyone else had become bored with the sordid mess at LGF.

Evidently Vanity Fair‘s editors decided that permitting that pretentious phony James Wolcott to befoul the blogosphere wasn’t enough, so now they’re grooming young Brown as a sort of junior varsity Wolcott.

Infinitely less interesting than VF‘s photos of Stephanie Seymour nude but, then again, isn’t everything?

(Graydon: Let Wolcott and Brown handle the boring-and-obnoxious-writing business. All I want is that photographing-nude-hotties gig.)

UPDATE II: Robert Spencer of JihadWatch reacts to the New York Times article but is strangely silent about Stephanie Seymour nude.