The World’s Least Credible Blogger™ has been tying himself into laughable knots of hilarious self-contradiction lately, attempting to defend President Wiretap Benghazi Failure against . . . Well, facts.
Facts have always been optional with Obama, who has relied on his media-generated force field to survive all previous encounters with unfortunate reality. Obama’s fawning fanboy Charles Johnson fancies himself an apostle of Scientific Truth (and imagines his antagonists are all ignorant bigots), but the relentless drip, drip, drip of scandalous facts the past few days have been quite hard on CJ’s self-image.
Once you read that, you realize this isn’t a “claim” made by conservatives, or something “alleged” to have happened: It’s a straight-up fact, and one that doesn’t fit within CJ’s worldview.
And man, it’s just been a cruel, cruel week for CJ’s worldview.
More fake outrage against our First Lady: Anchor Baby Malkin fails miserably at attempting to mock the First Lady’s “Evolution of Mom Dancing.”
The Obama Derangement Syndrome is more dangerous than syphilis.
Leaving aside entirely the epithet “anchor baby” (which leftists have falsely used for years against Malkin, the daughter of legal immigrants), where is the evidence that Malkin was trying to stir up “fake outrage”? She was merely parodying Michelle Obama’s dancing with Jimmy Fallon of “Saturday Night Live.”
Thin-skinned liberals can’t take a joke. And their indignation toward alleged right-wing racists is . . . well, convenient.
Permit me to suggest two likely results (a) some genuinely rich people will leave France, taking their wealth with them, and (b) a lot of the “rich” people in France won’t be so rich any more.
The point is that “rich” is often used to designate people who, at any given time, have a high annual income. This is not the same as “rich,” as in having a massive net worth, and it is certainly not the same as the cartoonish Thurston Howell III stereotype: People born to ultra-wealthy parents, who grow up in extraordinarily affluent circumstances, with nannies and butlers and chauffeurs, top-flight private schools, winter ski vacations at the family chalet, summers in the Hamptons, etc.
It’s resentment of the Thurston Howell III types that fuels this spiteful rage to make the rich “pay their fair share,” and so if François Hollande tries to jack up taxes on those people, they’ll either find ways to evade the taxes or else they’ll get the hell out of France. One way or another, by driving investment capital out of the private sector, such a soak-the-rich policy will have the effect of stifling economic growth, and reduce the incomes of everybody, including some high-income people — entrepreneurs, high-skill technicians, sales executives — who, earning less money in a weakened economy, will therefore not pay as much taxes at the higher rate as they would had the rates stayed the same.
So all this “strike fear in the hearts of the rich” noise is either just noise, or else it’s a plan to spread the misery around.
BTW, yes, I realize this is my second post in a row about François Hollande, and yes, I realize you probably don’t give a damn about the French. But it’s all over Memeorandum, and the rest of the news seems kinda meh today. So let’s have more fun with Euro-weenies, eh? Here’s Independent columnist Peter Popham:
Rise of far right threatens
to pollute politics across Europe
They may not have claimed ultimate victory, but the biggest winners of the elections in France and Greece were the parties of the extreme right. Fringe parties, some of them routinely labelled “neo-Fascist” until recently, have made stunning inroads into mainstream European politics, to the point that in France, Norway, Finland, Hungary and Austria they either hold or threaten to hold the balance of power. Governments are increasingly faced with the choice of either giving ground on hot-button issues such as immigration and Islam, or ceding power.
Hang on here: France elects a socialist who wants to impose tax rates as high as 75 percent, and it’s the “extreme right” we’re worried about? Speaking of irrational fear, Charles Johnson is hearing jackboots on the cobblestones again, as Diary of Daedalus reports:
The Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party has won 7% of the votes in Greece’s recent election. They will get 21 seats in the new parliament. This gave Charles Johnson an orgasm since he is obsessed with Nazis!
Seven percent of voters in Greece, a country with a population (11.3 million) roughly the size of Ohio, vote for this far-right party, and Charles Johnson imagines . . . what? The Greek neo-Hitler building up a mighty war machine? An Aegean Kristallnacht? An invasion of Macedonia? Greek bombers and tanks rampaging across the Mediterranean? Headline from the London Daily Mail:
Sounds scary, except they only got 7% of the vote! Assuming that the other 93% of Greek parliament members aren’t down for this agenda, the wacko plans of these “ultra-right” guys are as much of a genuine danger as the threat of Ron Paul becoming president. (OK, that scenario had some people jittery in December.) We’re talking about a comparative handful of powerless kooks in a weak, impoverished and demographically collapsing country on the far side of the globe.
The same people who want us all to freak out about Greek Nazis, of course, would be the first to accuse of us of irresponsible fear-mongering if we pointed out the dangers of, inter alia, narco-terrorists in Mexico or Mahmoud Ahmahdinejad in Iran.
Hell, I’m more afraid of Canadians than I am of the Greeks, and we could probably wipe out Canada in a week or two without mobilizing much more than the Minnesota National Guard.
When Charles Johnson went wacko and began purging commenters at his Little Green Footballs blog, he purged some of the most clever “Lizards” whose participation had once made LGF a must-read for many. Among the purged were those who formed Diary of Daedalus and The Blogmocracy, which today join forces to expose how CJ’s pro-Obama turn now requires him to become an apologist for the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan:
“He also has a strong message of responsibility and self-reliance for young African Americans, and that is why [critical race theory proponent Professor Derrick] Bell described him as a hero.”
Also:
“Farrakhan does have a positive, empowering component to his message.”
Well . . . OK. Except that in 2007, as the ex-Lizards demonstrate, Johnson condemned the Nation of Islam as “Farrakhan’s hate group.”
What explains this otherwise mysterious turn in Johnson’s view of Farrakhan and NOI? The simplest explanation is that four years ago, LGF was a conservative blog and CJ was expressing views shared by conservatives. Now, LGF is a left-wing site and thus Charles is required — as part of a general effort to defend the Democratic Party — to make excuses for President Obama’s association with Professor Bell, whose praise of Farrakhan is a matter of record. (Blame those “Jewish neoconservative racists“!)
So what Johnson once condemned as a “hate group” must now be praised for its leader’s “positive, empowering . . . message.”
At the time he publicly “parted ways with the Right” in November 2009, Charles Johnson made a big deal of his repugnance at being associated with various unsavory persons, groups and ideas. Yet you see that the logic of his politics now compel Johnson to defend Farrakhan — whom he formerly denounced in Oct0ber 2007, which was about the same time he was beginning his attacks on Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs for supposedly allying herself with unsavory elements in the European counter-jihad movement.
What happened? It’s hard to say, but when I saw the giant compilation of Johnson’s comments about Farrakhan over the years, I noticed something interesting: On April 29, 2008, CJ wrote indignantly that Obama must have known that Rev. Jeremiah Wright “traveled to Libya with Louis Farrakhan and met Muammar Gaddafi.”
However, less than five weeks later, when discussing a photo showing Michelle Obama with Farrakhan’s wife, Johnson replied to Zombie that this was “a big nothing . . . Eh.”
A big nothing? Really, Charles?
Considering how much hell you raised about Pamela Geller and Robert Spencerattending the Brussels conference with figures you deemed disreputable, how about a little consistency in regard to your guilt-by-association games? And now that you find yourself defending Farrakhan in order to defend Obama’s association with Derrick Bell, don’t you see how stupid that whole game is?
Never mind that now. My point is that you can see in this example a clear demonstration of just how quickly CJ’s opinions shifted: In April 2008, evidence of a Farrakhan connection to Obama was something Johnson took seriously. By June 2008, he dismissed similar evidence as “a big nothing.”
UPDATE: After all the unwarranted cruelty he dished out on Geller — and me, and Jim Hoft, and Ace of Spades, and everybody else who called him out on it — now Jazzy McBikeshorts wants to complain that he wasn’t quoted accurately:
There’s all kinds of news I need to be blogging about today, but offline duties intervened and — as much as I know it bores most of you — I just had to call attention to the latest in Johnsonoid craziness.
Charles Johnson went on a rant about “stalkers and dimwitted creeps” — a rant thoroughly and hilariously mocked — and in the process, CJ linked back to a 2009 thread that included links to a couple of former LGF fan sites. But those two ex-sycophants have since been banned from LGF, as Diary of Daedalus had noted in November. So . . .
Someone at Diary of Daedalus pointed out that Charles had, by linking to this 2009 thread, accidently called attention to “praise” from ex-LGFers who now despise their former idol. Well, CJ claims never to read the “stalker” site Diary of Daedalus, but overnight he killed the links and — here’s the payoff, for connoisseurs of irony — Chen Zhen at Diary of Daedalus created a flashing GIF showing the deletion.
ROTFLMAO.
What’s going on over at LGF these days? Nobody would know if it weren’t for the gallant ex-Lizards who toil diligently to keep us informed on the latest laughable developments in Lizardlandia. But just imagine how embarrassing it is to Charles Johnson that he is so irrelevant at a time when interest in the Egyptian situation is delivering big traffic to Michael Totten and Weasel Zippers and other conservative bloggers.
Back in the day, when a big story like this would break, LGF threads would be swarming with hundreds of keen-eyed conservative commenters linking the latest important news. Ah, but then Charles Johnson gave into his resentment of Pamela Geller‘s success, and began banishing every commenter who didn’t go along with his anti-Geller jihad and now . . .
OK, sorry to bother the readers with this mention of LGF. We’ll get back to blogging about interesting stuff, I promise. Just as soon as I can quit laughing.
What you see is that, at its peak in 2007-08, LGF routinely had 1,500-2,000 different people — identified in the chart as “unique nics” (nicknames) — commenting each week. That was essential to the functionality of LGF, which was always more of a comment-driven “community” blog, where the commenters provided more content than did the brief headline-type posts.
The number of LGF commenters appears to have peaked in late summer 2007, when 2,000-plus commenters were regularly participating, but by mid-2008 noticeably sagged toward 1,500. Interestingly enough, there was a period in 2008 when the number of comments increased even as the number of commenters declined.
The real freefall began in 2009 and, by late that year, the average number of “unique nics” commenting in a week fell below 500 for the first time. By early 2011, the core commenting community at LGF was down to about 250 people — which is to say, about one-eighth of what it had been in 2007.
That a site could lose more than 80% of its regular commenters in less than four years is remarkable. But it seems there is limited interest in railing against creationists, global warming “deniers” and, of course, those dangerous Belgians.
“I was such a small fish at the time. I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong.”
— Pamela Geller, January 2010
It’s interesting how easy it has become to ignore Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs. A couple weeks ago, Diary of Daedalus or the Blogmocracy had a post with a graphic showing the decline in LGF’s traffic since Johnson began his mad purge of commenters who didn’t cooperate with his site’s leftward shift. And I would have blogged about that, but why bother? Nobody cares about LGF anymore.
You’ve been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.
They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind. And if they feel you have lied to them — they’re revolutionaries. Nancy Pelosi, those are the people you should be worried about.
You will recall that after the 9/12 March on Washington in 2009, Nancy Pelosi gave a press conference warning about rhetoric that “created a climate in which violence took place” in San Francisco in the late 1970s:
And what Beck was trying to say on his June 2010 program was that Democratic leaders, who believed they could co-opt and use the radicalism of the Left for their political advantage, should worry more about extremism from their own allies than from the conservative opposition. You don’t have to believe that assertion — or be a Beck fan — to see that what the LGF post did was to twist Beck’s meaning into the exact opposite of what Beck intended.
What’s stunning is how easily Johnson — or rather one of his second-banana henchpeople, “Conservative Moonbat” — was gulled into that error. The Beck transcript was available online the whole time. The transcript was located by the third commenter on the LGF post and the fourth commenter observed:
So he says that Dems will have to shoot left-wing radicals “in the head”
So even LGF’ers quickly discovered that the headline on the post and the context-free video clip were misleading. What remains to be learned is whether “Conservative Moonbat” got this video from Raw Story, or vice versa. But it appears that Johnson’s second bananas are increasingly third-rate. What this episode highlights is the cause of LGF’s decline. At some point in 2007, Charles Johnson decided that his conservative allies were unworthy of his allegiance and needed to be destroyed. His war against Pamela Geller was the opening salvo in that campaign. But as Da Tech Guy once advised Joe Scarborough, “Sooner or later you have to join the side you’re on.”
In coalition politics we often find ourselves allied with people with whom we disagree, with people we don’t like, with people who we find in some way embarrassing or obnoxious. It may even be the case that prominent leaders and spokesmen of “our side” appear to be exactly the sort of people with whom we normally can’t stand to associate. We may feel that these leaders and spokesmen are in some way discrediting the cause we support. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, these people are contending for the same cause and are therefore not our political enemies.
Charles Johnson has cut himself off from conservatives and made them his enemies, without actually bothering to declare himself a liberal. Liberals were happy to celebrate Johnson’s defection from the Right, but the one-time dividend of a New York Times profile hasn’t yielded any lasting benefit.
No blog is an island. If you aren’t linked by other blogs, you can’t increase your readership. That which does not grow will eventually begin to die. When Johnson decided to make war on erstwhile blog allies, he also cut himself off from their readers, and without a readership — beyond the dwindling cult of sycophants — he has become irrelevant.
And Pamela Geller “was such a small fish,” y’know? It’s amazing what a “small fish” can accomplish.
