Category: Bill Schmalfeldt

Bill Schmalfeldt: Obsessed Much?

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You stay classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!

“Schmalfeldt . . . is closest to his sweaty-palmed Happy Place when he is describing degradation of others.”
— Ken White, Aug. 6

Deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt has many persistent traits, including habitual dishonesty and a tendency to mimic the rhetoric of his enemies. This latter trait is related to Schmalfeldt’s symptomatic psychological projection — accusing others of committing wrongs of which he is himself spectacularly guilty — but Schmalfeldt’s “monkey see, monkey do” imitations are also a confirmation of the moral and intellectual emptiness Ken White of Popehat has observed:

Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have principles. Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have values. Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have beliefs. Bill Schmalfeldt has enemies, and then nothing, a black and dank and empty void of sullenness.

Without values or principles, Bill Schmalfeldt is intellectually adrift, blown to and fro by his own gale-force hatreds. So whenever any of his chosen enemies — Aaron Walker, Lee Stranahan, whoever — describes Schmalfeldt’s behavior, it is only a matter of time before Schmalfeldt begins to parrot his enemy’s rhetoric, falsely accusing them in the same terms they have used to accurately describe him.

One can see this clearly in Schmalfeldt’s engagement with John Hoge. We know why Schmalfeldt became obsessed with Hoge, who aided Lee Stranahan when he flew from Texas to Maryland to file harassment charges. (See Stranahan’s account, “Bill Schmalfeldt: The Stranger Who Harassed My Family.”) Hoge was then targeted for similar harassment. He warned Schmalfeldt to cease contacting him and, when Schmalfeldt persisted, petitioned for and was eventually granted a peace order against Schmalfeldt. Hoge’s only interest in Schmalfeldt is to stop his harassment. Because harassment is Bill Schmalfeldt’s raison d’être, however, this illegal behavior persists. Hoge therefore continues (a) describing Schmalfeldt’s harassment, (b) seeking legal action to stop the harassment, and (c) enjoying the hilarious reactions of other spectators watching the carnival of Sideshow Bill’s craziness.

In “monkey-see, monkey-do” fashion, however, Schmalfeldt now routinely claims that Hoge is “obsessed” with him, and that he — the creepy kook Bill Schmalfeldt — is actually the victim of “harassment.”

Amid this twisted knot of psychological projection and rhetorical mimicry, however, the real Bill Schmalfeldt is always present. And one of the most disturbing aspects of his personality is his frequent resort to language about feces, anal sodomy and coprophagy. (See my Sept. 30 post, “Bill Schmalfeldt: Sadism, Sodomy and Other Bizarre Mental Aberrations.”) He clearly has an abnormal fixation:




It goes without saying that no decent person would deliberately fill their Twitter timeline with such foul and disgusting verbal imagery, yet this is Bill Schmalfeldt’s customary and routine mode of discourse.

Nor is this merely a matter of a thuggish personality with an obnoxious penchant for crude language. Rather, this would seem to be a symptom of Bill Schmalfeldt’s perverse psycho-sexual fixations:

Heck, if you’re a man and you’re honest with yourself, you LIKE being on the “doling it out”end of anal sex.  How many heterosexual men reading this diary right now have never asked their wife or girlfriend to just take a deep breath, relax, “I’ll just put in the tip and we’ll see how it goes,” and then you ram it home like Captain Kidd jamming his sword back into his scabbard while she hollers “takeitouttakeitouttakeitout” and you tell her to just relax and it won’t hurt so bad and she starts kicking and screaming “takeitOUTtakeitOUTtakeitOUT youfuckingbastardpieceofshit“ and you finally do (because the walls are thin and your neighbors just LOVE calling the cops) and you tell her she should have at least given herself a chance to relax and enjoy it and she (if she’s your wife) doesn’t let you anywhere near her with “that thing” for weeks and if she’s your girlfriend she stops returning your calls?

You stay classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!




 

 


A Maryland Criminal Arrest Warrant Was Issued Today for Bill Schmalfeldt

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From District Court of Carroll County, John Hoge reports.

It’s all fun and games until somebody goes to jail.

UPDATE: What I wrote Sunday:

After John Hoge asked the Court to enforce its peace order against deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, the latter decided he had not yet shown sufficient contempt of court, as Hoge explains:

He began tweeting to me within an hour-and-a-half of the judge’s ruling on the 16th, and he’s kept it up. . . .
So how has the Cabin Boy responded? He’s begun tweeting to me at an even greater rate.

Potential penalties are mounting, and why? Most likely because Schmalfeldt believes no judge would actually order him arrested.

It would appear Schmalfeldt has miscalculated.

UPDATE II: Y’know, it seems a mighty hard thing to arrest a guy for Twitter messages, and I feel sorry for Bill Schmalfeldt.

Or, at least, I did feel sorry for him, and then I remembered Lee Stranahan: “Bill Schmalfeldt: The Stranger Who Harassed My Family.”

UPDATE III: Linked by Matt Ross at Conservative Hideout — thanks! — and Aaron Walker comments at length, ending with: “Sometimes Karma’s a bitch, isn’t it Schmalfeldt?”

 


The Schmalfeldtian Fantasy

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After John Hoge asked the Court to enforce its peace order against deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt, the latter decided he had not yet shown sufficient contempt of court, as Hoge explains:

He began tweeting to me within an hour-and-a-half of the judge’s ruling on the 16th, and he’s kept it up. . . .
So how has the Cabin Boy responded? He’s begun tweeting to me at an even greater rate.

Potential penalties are mounting, and why? Most likely because Schmalfeldt believes no judge would actually order him arrested.

Every time bad things happen to Bill Schmalfeldt, he starts whining about what a helpless pitiful dying invalid he is and, having played the Pity Card over and over for so long, he seems to think he’s holding the trump card in the deck. Maybe he’s right.

On the other hand, the Maryland Court of Appeals rejected Schmalfeldt’s appeal of the peace order, didn’t it? And sympathy has its limits. Schmalfeldt tried to solicit advice from Ken White, and the Popehat proprietor’s reply was memorable for its arid acidity:

Moreover, I think my ability to be an effective advocate for Mr. Schmalfeldt is compromised, and could be questioned, because he has posted a fantasy about me being murdered, apparently because he is angry that I offered pro bono assistance to Patrick Frey in a First Amendment suit. Though I think his murder fantasy ultimately did not constitute a true threat that could be subject to criminal or civil sanction, I think his intent was to threaten me over my pro bono work on behalf of someone he doesn’t like, and that he would have been very happy if someone had murdered me in reaction to him encouraging them to do so and posting my office address. That may not have been a likely result of his post, given his limited (in every sense of the word) readership, but it was a possibility, and one I suspect he relished. That would make it unreasonably difficult for me to be effective on his behalf.

Let’s remember what Popehat said in in August: “Schmalfeldt . . . is closest to his sweaty-palmed Happy Place when he is describing degradation of others.” And why is that? My supposition has always been that Schmalfeldt has a sadistic personality, that he gets a sick thrill out of inflicting harm on others, and that he especially cherishes the fantasy of being able to inspire fear.

Specialists in abnormal psychology could probably tell us much about the causes of Schmalfeldt’s bizarre behavior, but what will the Carroll County Circuit Court do about it? Schmalfeldt seems to believe that the judge will do nothing and that, instead, terrible harm will befall John Hoge for asking the court to enforce its own order.

Kimberlin Unmasked has turned Schmalfeldt’s idiocy into a comic strip, which would be funnier, if Bill weren’t so sadly pathetic.

 


Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt Will Face Contempt of Court Charges?

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Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

John Hoge posted updates Friday about legal proceedings against lying felon Brett Kimberlin’s biggest fanboy, Bill Schmalfeldt:

Now, some readers may wonder — indeed, some have complained about it — why so much attention should be paid to an obscure assclown like Bill Schmalfeldt. Here’s your first clue:

For more than two years now, a series of people who have in one way or another found themselves on Brett Kimberlin’s Enemies List — including Patrick Frey, Mandy Nagy, Aaron Walker, Lee Stranahan and others — have complained about what would appear to be a pattern of orchestrated online harassment against them.

Much of that harassment, especially on Twitter, has emanated from pseudonymous entities such as @BreitbartUnmask, @X3n0ph0n and the now-defunct @OccupyRebellion. However, Schmalfeldt (who began cyberstalking Aaron Walker in June 2012) has harassed Kimberlin’s enemies under his own name, and with the encouragement of Melissa Brewer (@catsrimportant), whose connection to Kimberlin’s acknowledged “associate” Neal Rauhauser is beyond dispute.

Now we have, in Schmalfeldt’s own words, the explanation that this harassment (which he absurdly calls “investigating”) was done on behalf of Brett Kimberlin: Just forget Kimberlin exists, Schmalfeldt says — to Frey, Walker, Stranahan, Ali Akbar, et al. — and “no one,” including Bill Schmalfeldt, will continue this harassment.

Keep in mind that, at that time, the following was happening:

“Just forget Brett Kimberlin exists,” see?

In point of fact, however, if it hadn’t been for the constant harassment from Schmalfeldt and others, there would have been little reason for any of us to mention Brett Kimberlin in November 2012. And while I’d have to double-check, I’m reasonably sure that neither the Maryland Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., lawsuit nor the federal RICO suit that Hoge has dubbed Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al., cites anything any of us published in October or November 2012 as being defamatory. In other words, it would appear that the harassment we were enduring at the time of Schmalfeldt’s “just forget Brett Kimberlin exists” threat was in the nature of vindictive retaliation.

Let us then remember a key claim in Kimberlin v. Walker, et al.:

4. Defendants falsely wrote that other targets of theirs were part of “Team Kimberlin” and published that Plaintiff controlled, paid, and directed this vast network of “unsavory” operatives.

Just about every word there is a lie. Such people as Neal Rauhauser, Bill Schmalfeldt and Melissa Brewer were not our targets; rather, we were their targets and why? Because we had written about Brett Kimberlin’s criminal history and, as Schmalfeldt made clear, the harassment directed against us by Schmalfeldt and other members of “Team Kimberlin” was in reprisal for that unwelcome coverage.

Whether this harassment was “controlled, paid, and directed” by Kimberlin personally is a matter of speculation; that it was understaken on behalf of Kimberlin and intended to benefit him (by punishing his targeted enemies) would seem indisputable.

Bill Schmalfeldt’s words and actions are clear evidence thereof and — RES JUDICATA! — Maryland courts have found that Bill Schmalfeldt’s behavior constituted illegal harassment.

Obscure assclown though he may be, therefore, Bill Schmalfeldt’s actions during the past 17 months are quite relevant to the defense in Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., in a way similar to the recent misfortunes that have befallen Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser.

And let’s flash back to the June court hearing where Hoge was granted the peace order against Schmalfeldt:

Brett Kimberlin showed up in court for Schmalfeldt’s hearing. . . .
Walker and others believe they have been the targets of an orchestrated campaign of harassment aimed at Kimberlin’s enemies.
One might argue that Bill Schmalfeldt is merely a nutjob, but Kimberlin’s presence at today’s court hearing certainly suggests that the focus of Schmalfeldt’s madness was not entirely random.

If Kimberlin thought Schmalfeldt was sufficiently important to merit his presence for the Hoge v. Schmalfeldt hearing, what does that tell you? Help us fight this fight. Go hit the tip jar at Hogewash, or hit my tip jar, or contribute at BomberSuesBloggers.com.




 

 


Bill Schmalfeldt Lies to @SilverbergDave: Failure and the Exact Opposite of Truth

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Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

“Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have principles. Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have values. Bill Schmalfeldt doesn’t have beliefs. Bill Schmalfeldt has enemies, and then nothing, a black and dank and empty void of sullenness.”
— Ken White, Popehat, Aug. 6

Arguing with a sociopath is generally a waste of time, and if you dedicated yourself to exposing every malicious lie Bill Schmalfeldt tells, you would never have time for anything else. Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t call my attention to Schmalfeldt’s compulsive dishonesty and, while I know many readers have grown weary of hearing about his constant vile behavior, occasionally he does something so hatefully false that I simply cannot ignore it.

Bill Schmalfeldt has a habit of getting himself banned. He got banned from Daily Kos because of his grossly offensive anal rape “satire,” and has been repeatedly banned from the Examiner. In September, Schmalfeldt attempted to sneak back onto the Examiner as “Lester Klemper,” and when his unwelcome presence was (predictably) rejected, he unleashed obscenity-strewn threats of vengeance:

As I said at the time, this is typical Schmafeldt: The Dire Warning of Terrible Consequences — dreadful woe shall befall ye whom he hates.

What followed instead was Schmalfeldt’s complete humiliation at the Oct. 16 hearing on John Hoge’s peace order, and the subsequent rejection of Schmalfeldt’s appeal in the case. Keep in mind that, prior to the Oct. 16 hearing, Schmalfeldt had repeatedly boasted that he would prove Hoge guilty of perjury (!) with the predicted result that Hoge would leave the courtroom in handcuffs.

Threaten, threaten, threaten. Fail, fail, fail.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Meanwhile, however, Schmalfeldt had announced that he would begin writing for DigitalJournal.com. Schmalfeldt’s evident motive was that being published somewhere beside his own blog was necessary to Schmalfeldt’s defense of his harassment as “journalism.”

Of course, this was futile: Maryland’s harassment statute doesn’t have a Journalism Exemption. Schmalfeldt never got a chance to argue this in the Hoge v. Schmalfeldt hearing. Nevertheless, Schmalfeldt was a diligent DigitalJournal.com contributor, writing 56 articles between Sept. 25 and Oct. 27, generating 19,000 page-views. (That’s not bad, really, although by comparison this month I’ve published more than 150 posts with more than 300,000 page-views.)

It looked like Bill had found a home at DigitalJournal.com, but then he screwed it up because, as Ken White said, Bill has enemies.

Vengeance on his enemies is Schmalfeldt’s raison d’être and, after a month of being on his best behavior at DigitalJournal.com, he fell off the wagon and used an Oct. 25 article about the arrest of Alabama smear-blogger Roger Shuler to suggest that somehow Ali Akbar and I were responsible for Shuler’s arrest. That prompted Ali to write an e-mail to DigitalJournal.com publisher David Silverberg, and this false accusation was deleted from Schmalfeldt’s article.

But then in a follow-up article on Oct. 27, after name-checking me again, Schmalfeldt made a nameless reference to Lee Stranahan, which has been preserved by Aaron Walker:

Right wing bloggers don’t even need to have something actually happen to them to get the right wing blogosphere up in arms.
One writer for the extremist right wing blog Breitbart.com claimed a phony rape threat from a man with a progressive neurological disorder who lived 1,400 miles away from him. He sent the police to the man’s house, then cried to whoever would listen that he needed money, lots of money, so he could relocate his family. Right wing bloggers from coast to coast came to his aid, exhorting their readers to raise money for this man, who continued with his claim of death and rape threats from a man who would have to ask his wife to drive him the 1,400 miles to commit this imaginary crime the right wing blogger created in his mind.

I wrote to Silverberg asking that my name be removed from that article, and the above-quoted passage was also removed, so that all that remains of the Stranahan reference in the article is this:

In this climate where a right wing blogger can lie about a threat that never existed and raise thousands of dollars to “move” — and then not even change apartments — the left wing media establishment (such as it is) should be shamefaced over their lack of concern about an older man who is nursing his bruises behind bars while his wife remains barricaded in her house.

Ridiculous. You can read Aaron Worthing’s account and decide for yourself whether the rape threat was “phony,” and you can also read Stranahan’s own account, “Bill Schmalfeldt: The Stranger Who Harassed My Family.” Decide for yourself whether what Schmalfeldt was doing could be described as Ethical Journalism.

What was happening at DigitalJournal.com repeated a familiar pattern: Schmalfeldt was trying use his access to somebody else’s platform to pursue his personal enemies, the unprofessional behavior that got him banned from the Examiner in December 2011:

Bill,
I am yet again forced to discuss your column after you continued to (1) make your OBN articles personal, rather than talking about what such an organization is attempting to do and its potential implications, and (2) continued to reply in an antagonistic manner within the comments sections / Facebook.
Due to the continued disregard for projecting yourself in a professional manner, I am forced to suspend your access to our publishing platform again.
This was not how I hoped things would work out, but I’m no longer in a position to justify the amount of effort we as an organization have to put in to mitigate the complaints your work is constantly receiving. I wish you well on your blog.-
Best regards,
Kevin Staunton
Director, Northeast & Mid-Atlantic Regions

Bingo: “[T]he amount of effort we as an organization have to put in to mitigate the complaints your work is constantly receiving.”

That was in December 2011, when Schmalfeldt was pursuing his insane jihad against “Operation Burn Notice” (OBN), a Facebook group that opposed the recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Months before I ever heard of the guy, Schmalfeldt’s habits were making him obnoxious to management at the Examiner. Now, in October 2013, he has repeated the pattern at DigitalJournal.com, recycling his smears against Stranahan, Akbar and me with no legitimate journalistic purpose. And today, apparently in a snit because his articles were being edited, Schmalfeldt announced his resignation by publishing an e-mail exchange with Dave Silverberg:

Dave:
First, let me express my gratitude for taking me back, I appreciate it very much and have tried very hard to abide by your rules. I have no problem with you or the site, and I will always have a soft place in my heart for you guys.
It is clear that I can’t turn from side to side without being attacked by the trolls who have decided that I have to be denied from doing any writing anywhere for anybody. Nor am I particularly agreeable to having to defend myself to my editor whenever one of these trolls raises a stink with you. This is how they are trying to get me fired. I choose not to grant them that trophy.
So, with great regret, and to save you and your publication any further difficulty with these criminals (not hyperbole), I offer you my resignation. If you choose to accept it, please advise.
And again, I am an appreciative and humble servant.
Thanks again for the opportunity.
Bill Schmalfeldt

Hi Bill,
We respectfully accept your resignation, and we sympathize with your situation. They are relentless, those people following you around online.
Thanks for your time on the site, and we hope you still check out the news content and vote and comment, as you like.
Note your Digital Journalist status has been removed.
Wishing you the best,
David

This is such a steaming heap of nonsense, I scarcely know where to begin debunking it. Schmalfeldt was not being “attacked by the trolls.” Rather, he was using his DigitalJournal.com access to make defamatory accusations against three innocent people who just happen, coincidentally, to be targets of Brett Kimberlin’s wrath.

Bill’s version of events is the exact opposite of truth: He was not being attacked, he was attacking. He is not a victim, but a victimizer.

Contrary to his claim that “trolls” want to prevent Schmalfeldt “from doing any writing anywhere for anybody,” nobody paid any attention to his DigitalJournal.com writing until there were specific complaints made by specific people about two specific articles.

As far as anyone “trying to get [Schmalfeldt] fired,” that description fits exactly one person: Bill Schmalfeldt, whose repetition of his previously demonstrated bad habits was the sole cause of the problem.

However, notice — as did Aaron Walker — how in attacking Lee Stranahan, Schmalfeldt referred to himself in the third person as “a man with a progressive neurological disorder.” Were DigitalJournal.com readers informed at any time that the author of that article was the same person who made the “phony rape threat” against Stranahan?

Because . . . ETHICS!

So, having tried unsuccessfully to use DigitalJournal.com as a platform for pursuing his own vindictive obsessions, now Schmalfeldt dishonestly claims victimhood as an excuse for his latest failure.

And isn’t crazy “a progressive neurological disorder”?

 

Roger Shuler: Another Kook Succumbs to ‘Investigative Blogger Syndrome’

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Portrait of a Kook: Roger Shuler

“Shuler has not shown that any clearly established right has been violated. His only alleged evidence is a recorded phone call that he says supports the notion that he was terminated because of the political content of his blog. However, Shuler’s own transcript of the phone call shows only that his time spent researching content for his blog during working hours was a factor — and an ‘insignificant’ one, at that — in his termination. There is no evidence to suggest that the political content of his blog was a factor at all. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the UAB defendants on this claim.”
— 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, July 3, 2012

“There is not a grain of truth to warrant the horrible defamation published by you regarding our client. Each has no factual basis. Your outrageous, despicable conduct will be addressed in another forum: the Circuit Court of Jefferson County, Alabama.”
— Bill Baxley to Roger Shuler, Aug. 16, 2013

Before I get around to explaining what kind of lunatic Roger Shuler is, let’s stipulate a few hypothetical possibilities: Maybe Rob Riley had an affair with Liberty Duke, maybe Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange had an affair with Jessica Medeiros Garrison, maybe U.S. Circuit Court Judge William Pryor once posed nude back in the 1980s.

Any one or all of those accusations made by Roger Shuler might be true, without changing the conclusion that Roger Shuler is a kook.

Alabama Blogger Jailed, Apparently For
Not Obeying Order to Stop Publishing
Certain Information about Politician
— Reason, Oct. 25, 2013

That headline bothers me, and not merely because there are too many disgruntled kooks like Roger Shuler filling up the Internet with terabytes of lunacy, harassing and smearing innocent people.

The fact that Ali Akbar was one of the subjects of Shuler’s smears is certainly highly relevant to my interest, but maybe you don’t like Ali and maybe you don’t give a damn about me, either. My job is to explain to you why this particular kook — a demented inhabitant of the paranoid fringe — is typical of a general problem that affects you, even if you’re not a Republican who has been smeared by this kook.

In 2008, Shuler got “dooced,” i.e., fired from his job because of his unauthorized blogging. This happens to people. Maybe it’s wrong that it happens, but it is not social injustice, and it’s certainly not grounds to claim that you’re the victim of a corrupt political conspiracy, even if your plight gains sympathetic coverage from your allies.

Alabama US Attorney denies any involvement
in university editor’s termination
— Raw Story, July 11, 2008

U. of Alabama at Birmingham Editor Says
He Was Fired Over His Political Blog
— Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 2008

OK, so you got fired for blogging, and you’ve got allies celebrating you as a martyr for First Amendment rights. But when push comes to shove — when you sue your former employer and are required to show actual evidence of your victimhood — you lose.

Because you are a loser.

Then you decide to double down on losing.

See, here’s the thing: Winners take responsibility for their failures.

This is not pleasant or agreeable. Nobody likes to admit to themselves that they screwed up, nor does anyone relish the moment when they look at their latest screw-up and recognize that it bears a strong resemblance to their previous screw-ups, so that there is an actual pattern to their failures, indicative of an intrinsic personality flaw from which they can never really hope to escape.

“Wherever you go, there you are,” as the old saying has it, and yet we all know people who never learn that lesson. They go through life repeating the same pattern of failure, and always externalize the blame, in order to protect their damaged egos from shame.

But why bring up Bill Schmalfeldt at this point? Well, it seems that (a) Schmalfeldt helped peddle the ridiculous Ali Akbar-Karl Rove gay affair libel that Roger Shuler promoted last year, (b) that Schmalfeldt is now promoting the “First Amendment martyr” narrative about Shuler’s arrest on contempt charges last week, and (c) there is a striking resemblance between the modus operandi of Schmalfeldt and Shuler.

Ali Akbar examines how these two kooks operate, claiming that they can do any damned thing they want to do, because journalism.

Shuler is not a journalist, he’s an ax-grinder, a guy who has a personal grievance that he disguises as a political crusade which, however sane it might have seemed when he began it, has turned into the ideé fixe of an obsessed fanatic. Roger Shuler has become a kook.

“Corrupt + Republican + Karl + Rove” — let the reader count how many posts by Shuler’s Legal Schnauzer blog have contained that particular combination of words. It’s a lot, including one on Sept. 14, 2008, with this provocative headline:

The Palin Doctrine: Lie, Steal, Cheat, Threaten

Scarcely two weeks had passed since Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s running mate, and Shuler denounced Palin as the epitome of corrupt evil of which he himself claimed to be a victim:

So there you have it, the Palin Doctrine: Lie, Steal, Cheat, Threaten. It’s a fascinating and evolving story on the national stage. But as I sit here in Shelby County, Alabama, and ponder what I’ve witnessed for the past eight years, I can’t help but think, “Despite what the pundits say, there is nothing fresh and new about Sarah Palin. If you have lived in Karl Rove’s Alabama, this kind of chicanery is old news.”

Perhaps the pattern is self-evident without my having to elaborate too much: Choose some pre-demonized political scapegoat, attribute to them malevolent action and malicious motive, compare them to those whom you allege have victimized you, and then use your own accusations as a pretext to justify further accusations against them.

Now, all you need to do is to add the magic ingredient: Describe what you are doing as “investigative journalism,” include a lot of noise about “corruption” that your more gullible readers can accept as an explanation of why these doers of foul deeds are getting away with it, and dismiss as irrelevant any facts or logic to the contrary.

You have now succumbed to Investigative Blogger Syndrome.

The most famous example of this paranoid kook motif is Barrett Brown, the former Anonymous spokesman who flipped out in September 2012, uploaded a bizarre YouTube rant about his plans to “destroy” an FBI agent, and is now in federal custody in Texas.

Here’s how I described Barrett Brown’s stock in trade:

Like the rituals of certain South Pacific islanders, the Cargo Cult Journalist hopes that his simulacrum of what he ignorantly imitates will magically bring the same result as the real thing. Cargo Cult Journalism is the kind of stuff we once encountered in smudgy mimeographed newsletters, “underground” newspaper tabloids, cheaply printed pamphlets and self-published books by crackpots who warn about conspiracies involving the Bavarian Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Military-Industrial Complex. In the digital age, however, many people have trouble distinguishing between this kook-fringe imitation of “reporting” and genuine journalism, a distinction blurred by the increasingly shabby quality of product issued by respectable organs of the mainstream media.

There are reputable people who want you to believe Barrett Brown is a First Amendment hero and a political prisoner. Democrat Underground claims Shuler is a “political prisoner,” too. Did any of these people say a word of complaint when Brett Kimberlin had Aaron Worthing arrested last year? No, of course, they did not. And, in point of fact, Roger Shuler celebrated Kimberlin as a hero:

 In a delicious example of “turnabout is fair play,” Kimberlin has used right wingers’ tactics against them — causing the recent arrest of one thug, the outing of another as a criminal, and the transmission of a notice to others that they face possible legal action…
Key bloggers have written anonymously, but Kimberlin was able to determine their identities and bring legal action against them.

The man whom Shuler called a “thug,” Yale Law alumnus Aaron Walker, offers an erudite discussion of Shuler’s legal predicament:

No, Mr. Shuler, you were plainly playing cheerleader to an anti-freedom-of-expression thug. The most charitable interpretation is that you were such a partisan hack on this that you refused to see how you were cheerleading a clear violation of my First Amendment rights, that you were engaged in willful ignorance and cheering on a precedent that might be used against you in the future.
So part of me feels it is just deserts when I learned that recently you were ordered not to blog about something, that you were found to be in contempt of that order, that you were arrested as a result and when you allegedly resisted arrest, you were beaten to some degree because of it. I admit that part of me chuckled, reading back over your old post praising what Kimberlin had done to me.
But even Brett Kimberlin’s bootlickers have rights.

Roger Shuler, Shelby County Jail inmate No. 288928

Let’s pause to ask: Is there a moral equivalence between the reporting that I and others have done about Brett Kimberlin and the kind of Investigative Blogger Syndrome act that has landed Roger Shuler in the Shelby County Jail as Inmate No. 288928?

It’s a fair question, and there have been many times in the past 17 months that I’ve stopped, stepped back and asked myself whether I’ve gone down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. But the list of people who’ve endured the same pattern of harassment is long enough that, even if I were not a defendant in the federal RICO suit Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al., the story would still be newsworthy.

Crazy as hell, yes, but still newsworthy:

Like Kimberlin’s past acts of anti-free-speech thuggery, his tactics serve to remind people of the very facts he seeks to bury.
With the filing of this lawsuit, more people will learn that Brett Kimberlin was convicted for setting off numerous bombs, one of which blew off a man’s leg. More people will learn of his dishonest machinations to avoid paying a wrongful death judgment to the widow of the man whose leg Kimberlin blew off — a Vietnam veteran who survived the war, but could not survive the pain of the wounds Kimberlin inflicted. More people will learn that, when he set off those bombs in Speedway, police suspected him of complicity in the murder of a grandmother of a young preteen girl, with whom Kimberlin had had a relationship that many people (including the grandmother) considered inappropriate. . . .
Kimberlin’s actions are not rational — but then, “rational” is not a word you would typically use to describe a violent criminal sentenced to 50 years in prison for maiming a man with a bomb. . . .

And here’s the key difference: I didn’t pick a pre-demonized scapegoat. I didn’t claim that the story I’m covering proves corruption by Eric Holder or President Obama or some other conspiratorial combination of Democrats. Trust me when I say that there are plenty of people who can’t figure out why Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser hasn’t been arrested yet. And well do I recall some people last year telling me, “Stacy, you’ve got to show how this is connected to Obama.”

Except I can’t, and don’t pretend I can. To this day, most people have never heard of Brett Kimberlin and, even if it were demonstrated that there was a secret deal whereby the Justice Department agreed to look the other way while Kimberlin funded an elaborate scheme to destroy Andrew Breitbart and cripple conservative New Media, I seriously doubt this would ever be noticed by the New York Times.

No, I have no delusions of grandeur or fantasies of heroic vindication, which is what motivates ax-grinding kooks like Roger Shuler.

Maybe these differences are rather nuanced. Maybe this whole thing is too “meta” for most people to care about. But I’m not in the Shelby County Jail, and Roger Shuler is — because he’s a kook.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

 

BomberSuesBloggers.com

 

Legal Woes Mount for Alabama Anti-GOP Conspiracy Theory Blogger Roger Shuler

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Roger Shuler, Shelby County Jail inmate No. 288928

The arrest of “Legal Schnauzer” blogger Roger Shuler, which I reported Friday at The American Spectator and blogged about here in the wee hours, has tipped over quite an interesting row of dominoes.

As recently as Oct. 19, a certain “RogerS” was boasting of his expertise in RICO lawsuits and claiming that perjuring bomber Brett Kimberlin’s lawsuit against bloggers was a legal tour de force:

Oh, no! An anonymous Breitbart Unmasked commenter calling himself “Roger S” asserts that he has handled many many RICO lawsuits, and Brett Kimberlin’s is super awesome and is going to make him a lot of money! Honey, where did I put the checkbook? Looks like it’s time to write a big fat settlement check to Mr. Convicted Bomber, because he is going to kick my ass in court! Experienced RICO Lawsuit Expert “Roger S” says so!

If, as some have suggested today, “RogerS” is actually the self-same Roger Shuler (Shelby County Jail inmate No. 288928), then his comments at a pro-Kimberlin web site are what lawyers called “evidence.” Speaking of lawyers, an Alabama attorney today e-mailed Roger Shuler:

From: [Influential Montgomery Lawyer]
Date: Sat, Oct 26, 2013
Subject: Cease and Desist to Roger Shuler from Ali Akbar re: Karl Rove
To: [email protected]

Mr. Shuler:
Please see the attached correspondence. It is a demand from Mr. Ali Akbar that you cease and desist all false, defamatory, and reckless comments about Mr. Akbar, specifically with respect to your false allegations Mr. Akbar engaged in a gay love affair with Karl Rove. In addition, it is a demand you delete and retract all such false and defamatory allegations within 10 days or face swift and certain legal action.
Sincerely,
[Influential Montgomery Lawyer]

While it is contrary to my personal creed to file lawsuits, it appears that certain communications published by Roger Shuler may be material to my defense in both the state and federal lawsuits Brett Kimberlin has filed against me and other bloggers (it’s probably unfair to call Simon & Schuster a “blogger”), and I have politely requested access to specific information relevant to the case.

Do inmates in the Shelby County Jail have e-mail access? Probably not, and so it may take a while for Ali’s lawyer to get a reply.

“Swift and certain legal action” — truth and justice, baby.

 

BomberSuesBloggers.com

 




 

 


The Going Gets Weird: Alabama Liberal Blogger Arrested on Contempt Charge

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Roger Shuler, Shelby County Jail inmate No. 288928

I reported this Friday at The American Spectator:

Alabama attorney/blogger Roger Shuler was arrested Thursday in Shelby County and held without bond, charged with two counts of contempt of court in a case that has sparked conspiracy theories pointing the finger of blame at Republican officials, including the son of former Alabama Gov. Bob Riley.
Capt. Ken Burchfield of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office confirmed Friday that Shuler was being held in the county jail in Columbiana pending a hearing. Shuler was arrested “pursuant to a court order,” and was also charged with resisting arrest, Burchfield said. A jail mugshot showed Shuler, inmate No. 288928, with an apparent swollen bruise on his left eye.
Shuler is a liberal blogger who has been sued for defamation by Riley’s son Rob, by lobbyist Liberty Duke and by Republican lobbyist Jessica Garrison. At his Legal Schnauzer blog, Shuler has claimed that Rob Riley had an extramarital affair that led to Duke’s divorce. Schuler has also been sued by Garrison, a divorcee whom he accused of having a “long running affair” with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange. . . .

You can read the whole thing. It has been reported elsewhere that Shuler was actually arrested Wednesday. The timing of Shuler’s arrest is relevant because I mentioned Thursday night that Shuler’s blog had been used in 2012 to spread the ridiculously false claim that Karl Rove was having a gay affair with Ali Akbar — a claim which originated with “a political operative on the left,” who I suspect to be Brett Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser. And, strange as it may seem, both Rauhauser and Bill Schmalfeldt tried Friday to claim that Schuler’s arrest had something to do with me. Ridiculous, right?

In fact, Shuler had refused to attend a court hearing on a contempt motion by the plaintiffs Riley and Duke, and had continued to publish a lot of conspiracy-theory crap about Karl Rove and Jack Abramoff (neither of whom have anything to do with this case), also alleging that the presiding judge was corrupt, et cetera.  It was kinda like the Barrett Brown case, without the YouTube meltdown.

Guess what? You can’t do that.

I mean, you can’t scoff at the court’s authority and denounce the judge as corrupt and not expect to get a contempt citation. You can’t do that even if you believe the court is violating your rights.

Lots of people feel they get screwed over in court — ask any divorced man ordered to pay child support to his no-good two-timing ex-wife — but they are still required to cooperate in ordinary court proceedings. And it doesn’t matter if you are a journalist or a blogger and the case is about politics, you’re still obligated to respect the court, even though competent authorities advise you that the court’s orders are an unconstitutional “prior restraint” on free speech.

I say this with full knowledge that Brett Kimberlin, The World’s Worst Pro Se Litigant™, is trying to use both Maryland and federal courts in an attempt to shut me up. Even if you’re being sued by a creepy perjuring bomber, you still have to respect the court.

Or move to Vanuatu, which I still haven’t ruled out.

Anyway, I had nothing to do with the arrest of Roger Shuler, but I’m not going to be suing Bill Schmalfeldt for defamation, because there’s no need to sue a lying scumbag when you can just expose the lying scumbag, and then double-dog dare him to sue you.

The burden of proof is always on the plaintiff, see? Good luck to anyone seeking to prove Bill Schmalfeldt is not a lying scumbag and, as far as Rob Riley’s alleged affair is concerned . . .

No, I’d better not tell you what Karl Rove told me about that.

Shhhh. It’s a conspiracy.