Category: Blogging

In Which the Untalented @AndOHehir Gets Owned by @AceOfSpadesHQ

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Some liberal motifs are perennial:

When God and Man at Yale was published in 1951, liberals denounced Buckley as a fanatic and worse. One hostile reviewer accused him of “un-Christian arrogance,” while another said that Buckley’s book had “the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night.”

From a 2010 Andrew O’Hehir “movie review” at Salon.com:

“Secretariat” is such a gorgeous film, its every shot and every scene so infused with warm golden light, that I began to wonder whether the movie theater were on fire. Or my head. But the welcoming glow that imbues every corner of this nostalgic horse-racing yarn with rich, lambent color comes from within, as if the movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose. (Or as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.) I enjoyed it immensely, flat-footed dialogue and implausible situations and all. Which doesn’t stop me from believing that in its totality “Secretariat” is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse.

Who is Andrew O’Hehir and why should we care? Well, he’s a lousy movie critic who is obsessed with the kind of political themes that you find in a Lawrence O’Donnell rant, and the two phenomena are related, obviously. There are lousy movie critics who are liberal, and good movie critics who are liberal, and then there are untalented assclowns like Andrew O’Hehir who attempt to substitute politics for ability. That is to say, they are employed by liberal publications not because they are good writers, but because they are liberals and, in the case of Andrew O’Hehir, that means he doesn’t actually review movies, as such. Instead, he reviews the politics of movies.

It’s redolent of the soul-destroying party-line conformity that you thought died with Stalin — “How does this movie advance the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat?” –– except Andrew O’Hehir does this and think he’s being avant-garde. Anyway . . .

For reasons unknown, Salon decided that they would let Andrew O’Hehir write an article about how the bankruptcy of Detroit is the fault of right-wing Republican racists. This in turn inspired Ace of Spades to ponder the question, “Who the fuck is Andrew O’Hehir?”

Nailed it again. I’m gonna just call this guy “The Nailgun” because he nails everything in sight.

Read the whole brutal thing.

 

Dammit, @CalebHowe, Get Better! UPDATE: Let’s Make It $30,000 Tonight

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You’re pissing me off here, Caleb. There’s no sick leave in the blogosphere, and this “going to the hospital” stuff is not allowed. Besides, quite honestly, I can’t handle the stress. Being a middle-aged blogger — “middle-aged,” if the life expectancy of a two-pack-a-day smoker is 106 — has become increasingly stressful.

First Andrew Breitbart died at 43, then Chip Gerdes died at 42, and the sense of living on borrowed time is really starting to get on my nerves. Besides all the stress problems you’re causing, Caleb, those of us who survive by rattling the tip jar are praying for you to have a miraculous sudden recovery, because:

  1. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with your brother Ben, and we’ve never liked him as much as we like you;
    and
  2. Until you get better, we’ll feel vaguely guilty about asking readers to have pity on our pathetic needs.

There are too many pompous liberal douchebags who still need you to mock them, Caleb. And there are too many RINO sellouts who need to be exposed and driven into the oblivion of disgraced exile.

All this lollygagging around in the hospital, with the nurses giving you sponge baths? Not allowed. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

So I just contributed $20 to “Caleb’s Girls Fund,” and I’m telling all my readers to give as much as they can — $10, $20, $100, whatever — because this liver disease you’ve got is really bad for you, but I’m just getting too damned old to be dealing with all this stress.

GIVE NOW to CALEB’S GIRLS FUND!

UPDATE: As of 4 p.m., the fund was at $27,624 from 563 donors, an average donation of $49.97. The original goal was $25,000, which was raised in three days, but there’s no reason in the world it shouldn’t be $30,000 or $40,000 by Monday. This pisses me off because, really, it should never come to this.

Somebody on Twitter said “charity,” well, charity, my ass!

In the 2012 election cycle, the top 5 GOP conservative super-PACS raised $336.9 million, a lot of which went straight into the pockets of consultants, or was spent on lame-ass TV commercials that did little or nothing in terms of moving the needle of public opinion.

If you took just 10% of that super-PAC total ($33.4 million), you could pay 500 bloggers more than $67,000 a year.

Ask yourself if 500 Caleb Howes wouldn’t be more valuable than a bunch of consultants collecting fat commissions. I repeat: Charity, my ass.

Larry O’Connor himself gave $500, but the key to a crowdsourced fund drive is lots of small donations — lots of people giving $10, $20, $50 — because everybody can afford that. Hell, if I could give $20, a damned streetcorner hobo could panhandle up $5, y’know?

GIVE NOW to CALEB’S GIRLS FUND!

 

Vile Lie-Peddler @Karoli Kuns and the Posthumous Vindication of Breitbart

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“Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities. If there were ever any honest person employed by the New York Times (we stipulate the hypothetical), that person would have been obligated to quit Thursday morning [July 25], when the banner headline on the front page of the paper should have been: ‘ANDREW BREITBART WAS RIGHT.'”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Beauty, Brains and Bias,” The American Spectator, July 26

Andrew Breitbart had a special contempt for Karoli Kuns, whose hatefulness and ignorance are exceeded only by her stunning dishonesty. Of course, there is no such thing as an honest Democrat, but the vile lies peddled by Karoli Kuns are especially odious because she has made a habit of hatefully smearing honest and decent people.

It’s formulaic: Anyone who tells the truth, Karoli Kuns calls a liar, while she reserves her highest praise for people whose dishonesty is notorious. And speaking of Neal Rauhauser, here is how Karoli Kuns praised the head “Weiner Truther” in November 2012:

From the moment the Anthony Weiner scandal broke, Neal Rauhauser smelled a rat, and as it turns out, he was right. . . .
I’m certain the Breitbots expected all left-wing outrage over the setup to evaporate when Rep. Weiner resigned. . . .
One person wouldn’t let it go, and that one person was Neal Rauhauser, who kept on with it and keeps on with it until this day.

Well, well, well, Karoli Kuns. Seems you’ve changed your tune, eh?

Whereas in 2012, you were certain that Anthony Weiner was an innocent victim of a “setup” by “Breitbots” — and thus, Weiner’s defender Neal Rauhauser was deserving of praise — now that Andrew Breitbart has been vindicated and Anthony Weiner has been disgraced, you say the Weiner story is “not of national concern.”

Because you peddle vile lies, that’s why.

There was never any “setup” of Anthony Weiner by anyone. All honest and intelligent people recognized this in 2011, but Neal Rauhauser manufactured a series of lies intended to deceive the ignorant and Rauhauser was, as you say, the one person who “wouldn’t let it go.” He was the acknowledged leader of “Weiner Truthers” and he kept lying about Andrew Breitbart even after Breitbart was dead.

Karoli Kuns of Ventura, California, interviewed on GRITtv, 2010

Were you stupid enough to believe Neal Rauhauser’s lies about Andrew Breitbart, Karoli Kuns? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and instead conclude that you knew Rauhauser was lying — as any intelligent person would — and deliberately helped him peddle vile lies, because that’s all you’ve ever done in your entire life.

And here’s the truly interesting thing, Karoli Kuns: The title of that dishonest 3,000-word November 2012 blog post of yours didn’t even mention either Andrew Breitbart or Anthony Weiner.

Neal Rauhauser, Brett Kimberlin,
and a Right Wing Blueprint

Isn’t that interesting, Karoli Kuns? Your entire purpose was to defend the notorious liar Neal Rauhauser and the convicted felon Brett Kimberlin.

And how did you do that? You peddled vile lies.

Here’s what you wrote about Neal Rauhauser:

Neal Rauhauser in particular has been robbed of his ability to earn a living simply because right wing bloggers decided to make him the devil incarnate with no evidence, no actual wrongdoing, and no foundation in truth.

“No foundation in truth”? When were you ever interested in truth, Karoli Kuns? I would ask you to go read “‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection,” if I thought you were interested in truth, but you’re not now and never have been.

Rauhauser hasn’t been “robbed of his ability to earn a living.” Certainly “right wing bloggers” have not prevented any liberal group from hiring Rauhauser. The problem is, Neal is so compulsively dishonest even liberals don’t want to work with him. Which is amazing, considering some of them don’t mind being associated with you.

As for your “who are we to judge” attitude toward Brett Kimberlin — “Whatever the truth about Kimberlin’s past is,” as if the facts weren’t actually known — there are a couple of important names missing from your account: Julia Scyphers and Carl DeLong. Once people know about Julia Scyphers and Carl DeLong, it tends to affect their attitude about Brett Kimberlin. Not in a good way, either.

Hey, did you know Tetyana Kimberlin fears for her life?

Please don’t pay any attention to the facts, Karoli Kuns.

All honest and decent people share Andrew Breitbart’s contempt for you, but whatever you do, don’t ever repent your vile lies.

Because we wouldn’t want you to save your soul from Hell.

 

Barrett Brown: Madness Foreshadowed

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December, 2010: Barrett Brown explains his
‘informational schematic’ on YouTube.

“I wonder to myself: Where do these trolls come from? Where do they live and breed? . . .
“Many militants are devoid of an essential ingredient of being human: empathy. . . .
“They afford themselves free rein to act out their basest of impulses.”
— “Robin of Berkeley,” Dec. 3, 2010

“You might get the idea that Barrett Brown is kind of a moody loner, isolated and alienated, attempting to invent a social context for himself where none exists. And if that’s your impression of Brown, you might find it highly significant that the primary subject of Barrett Brown’s online videos is . . . Barrett Brown.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Narcissism, Isolation and Trolls,” Dec. 3, 2010

Barrett Brown is now in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth, Texas, scheduled for trial in September on multiple felony counts that could send him to prison for more than 100 years. Why did no one else see this coming?

“So this reader widget, it works off a human filter of these very erudite people, all together, and provides what should be the best means of obtaining information in existence. “

That is a quote from Barrett Brown’s YouTube “Video153,” in which he rambled on rather incoherently about his plans to gather “very erudite people” to participate in what he called a “schematic.” On Dec. 3, 2010 — that is to say, nearly two years before his September 2012 arrest — I compared Barrett’s incipient madness to that of Patrick Bedell, the schizophrenic Pentagon gunman who got himself shot to death in an apparent “suicide by cop” in March 2010. (See, “Whatever Happened to Crazy?” at Hot Air.) And it is remarkable that now, when Barrett Brown is being celebrated by the Left as a martyr, nobody can be bothered to transcribe this 13-minute video:

Because no one has provided a full transcript — and I’m about to leave on a road trip, so I certainly don’t have time now — the best way I can describe Barrett’s discourse is this: Imagine Wile E. Coyote on Oxycontin, outlining his new super-genius plan to catch that elusive Roadrunner, using Acme rocket skates, 400 feet of rope, an elaborate series of pulleys, two cups of bird seed, and a 95-pound anvil.

We know how this cartoon ends, don’t we?

The word you’re looking for is “grandiose.”

Grandiosity is a term psychologists use to discuss the delusions of greatness that are symptomatic of schizophrenia or, to a lesser degree, the manic phase of bipolar disorder:

Bipolar patients experience delusion during the worse part of their illness. Typically, when experiencing or displaying a stage of heightened excitability, joy, rage, senselessness, and correlated phenomena they might convey thoughts or beliefs that are grandiose in nature. Some of these grandiose beliefs frequently involve thoughts that the patient is very rich or famous or has super human abilities, etc.

In less severe manifestations, grandiosity is associated with narcissism, which is in turn a function of feelings of shame and failure. The damaged ego of the narcissist is unable to cope with failure and overcompensates through a series of rationalizations, including exaggerated and unrealistic schemes to achieve the success (and receive the admiration) he craves. The impracticality of these plans, the yawning gap between (a) the grandiose goals of such schemes and (b) the ability of the person to do what he aspires to do, is significant of the psychological need this kind of fantastic plan serves: A desire for recognition as a superior person, thus to vanquish the feelings of shame associated with the sense of failure.

Barrett Brown is an intelligent person. As a child, he earned praise for his intelligence and was thought to have exceptional promise. But he became a college dropout and a heroin addict, scraping along with meager earnings. He co-authored a book in his mid-20s and discovered that being that grand thing, a “published author,” isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. Whoop-dee-doo, y’know? It ain’t like you’re a zillionaire rock star with limousines, champagne and showgirls.

This video in December 2010 where Barrett tried to describe his “informational schematic” wasn’t so much a career plan as the symptom of an unhealthy mind tending toward thought patterns that were disorganized and grandiose. Being something of an amateur student of abnormal psychology, I recognized it as such and described it accurately, and now fast-forward to September 2012:

Ask yourself, “Why have Barrett Brown’s admirers never fully transcribed that video rant?” Because it’s haphazard paranoid gibberish, and not the discourse of the hero they want him to be.

It does not matter, really, whether there was anything genuinely newsworthy about the subjects — HBGary and “Team Themis,” etc. — that became the focus of Barrett Brown’s obsessive interest. Other people have written about those subjects without going crazy. And anyone who hails this narcissistic wackjob as a heroic martyr is seriously misguided. Barrett Brown was mentally ill and, according to federal grand jury indictments, a criminal menace.

There is news today: Anthony Weiner’s campaign manager resigned, and people are beginning to ask questions about the thousands of dollars that Weiner’s campaign spent to “investigate” claims that his 2011 scandal was the result of hacking.

“Gosh, who do you think is filling Weiner in on this?” said . . . Neal Rauhauser?

A stalker is terrorizing CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and Bill Schmalfeldt is still crazy, but I’m about to hit the road to cover another story. Could be interesting. Your prayers are earnestly requested, and remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are still: Hit the freaking tip jar.

 

 


Bill Schmalfeldt Finally Gets His Reply

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

“I’m disgusted that it has come to this. I thought that Facebook, being an honorable organization that everybody loves, that everybody has heard of, would honor its own terms of service and remove this cancer, this tumor, this malignancy from its own service.”
— Bill Schmalfeldt, Dec. 15, 2011

“Just in case you ever entertain the thought that Bill Schmalfeldt might be sane, remember this: When accused of criminal harassment, Schmalfeldt’s reaction is . . . more harassment.. . .
“It’s as if he is incapable of learning anything, or is unable to restrain his insane urges to lash out at the targets of his obsessive rage.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, July 19

Every picture tells a story, as an old song says. In 2011, during the Wisconsin recall battle, Bill Schmalfeldt went to war against a Facebook group that was supporting Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The group calling itself “Operation Burn Notice” (OBN) was the subject of multiple posts Schmalfeldt wrote at Daily Kos.

About a Facebook group, you see.

Lacking all sense of proportion, Schmalfeldt’s war against this Facebook group became extremely bitter because, in essence, he began “doxing” the group’s members, publishing personal information about them, accusing them of crimes, etc., as he himself explained:

The cowards behind “Operation Burn Notice” can’t even be SHAMED into identifying themselves. . . .
I have mentioned three names that have been suggested to me as being involved in this OBN effort. I make no such assertions, other than to say every time I attempted to place a redacted version of a picture of these folks, their identities obscured, it was swiftly removed from their Facebook page.
[T]hese freedom-hating slugs . . . are discussing a crime that could land them in jail for 3-1/2 years and cost them $10,000 each.

This war-of-annihilation theme is a pattern in Bill Schmalfeldt’s online behavior and, whenever he fails to achieve his goals, he invariably claims that he is being victimized, that other people aren’t playing fair, and then attempts to play “Internet Cop,” threatening to have people arrested, to get them fired from their jobs, to sue them, to have their various Internet accounts shut down, etc. During the course of his obsessive anti-OBN jihad, Bill Schmalfeldt decided to give a 19-minute Terms of Service (TOS) lecture to Facebook:

Well, you know what they say about karma, right? About five months later, in May 2012, Bill Schmalfeldt put up a genuinely vile rant about anal sex at DailyKos and was banished. (He attempted to get back on DKos last week and was re-banished.)

It’s interesting how this cosmic principle operates: Bad things happen to bad people and, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” The people in that Facebook group whom Schmalfeldt sought to persecute — claiming they were infringing his copyrights, among other things — had nothing to do with Schmalfeldt getting banished from Daily Kos. That was a self-inflicted wound, as such downfalls usually are. Bad people do bad things and get away with it, so they keep doing bad things until that day comes when they don’t get away with it. Thus Schmalfeldt is banned (again) from Daily Kos, while Barrett Brown is in federal custody, facing felony charges that could put him away for a long, long time.

“Pray for Ten Thousand Angels,” I said last November, when Bill Schmalfeldt’s relentless harassment finally escalated to the point that he was threatening to call my wife. That was the first time I ever posted a photo of Schmalfeldt. If you’ve been reading John Hoge’s blog lately, you know that Schmalfeldt filed a “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” notice, claiming Hoge had “stolen” Schmalfeldt’s intellectual property. Schmalfeldt also filed a DMCA notice with our web-hosting company, which is now handled through Ali Akbar’s Pundit Syndication LLC. This is being dealt with appropriately. (Click here to read Ali’s reply.)

Bill Schmalfeldt being who he is, however — which is to say, a deranged cyberstalking troll — has been ranting and raving on Twitter, demanding that I personally take notice of his nuisance claim.

So I decided that it was finally time to reply to e-mails Schmalfeldt sent me months ago. Five thousand words. Enjoy. — RSM Continue reading Bill Schmalfeldt Finally Gets His Reply →

Who Tipped BuzzFeed About Weiner’s Cyber-Girlfriend Sydney Leathers?

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My friend Donald Douglas this morning was rather shocked at how quickly I jumped onto the Sydney Leathers story, but I explained on Twitter what I said on the blog Tuesday night: Before I ever heard of Sydney Leathers, the BuzzFeed article was already a banner headline at Drudge, so there wasn’t really anything left to debate. Certainly I wasn’t “outing” her. Ezra Dulis at Big Journalism was all “[redacted] this” and “[redacted] that,” as if ignoring the news could make it less newsworthy, but the news business just doesn’t work that way.

What I added to the story — on the basis of tips from a keen-eyed Twitter buddy — was that (a) Sydney Leathers is a former Obama campaign worker and (b) Sydney Leathers authored a 2011 petition that condemned Sarah Palin for “inciting violence.” That’s news.

If anyone wants to criticize BuzzFeed, they ought to ask: Where did they get the ID of Sydney Leathers? Was this just  a case of clever “investigative journalism” or was it — as I strongly suspect — the result of a tip from a source allied with Team Weiner?

This is not to say, however, that BuzzFeed should not have run with the story once they got that tip. Once you know somebody is shopping around that kind of info, you’re confronted with a kind of devil’s dilemma: “If I don’t take this scoop, somebody else will.”

Such dilemmas occur all the time in political reporting, where people with obvious motives offer you oppo-research materials.

Do you really want to turn up your nose at the offered dossier, knowing that if you do, you’ll probably find it reported in all its tawdry glory somewhere else? Remember that in 2008, there were reporters for major news organizations who knew about the reports of John Edwards’ extramarital affair, but wrongly dismissed them as “tabloid gossip.”

I’ve got a particular interest in the question of who ID’d Sydney Leathers because, for months, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. has entertained the possibility that the harassment of Brett Kimberlin’s enemies was somehow being funded by supporters of Anthony Weiner.

Speculation isn’t my business, but when you observe extraordinary behavior, you can’t preemptively rule out extraordinary motives.

One of the bloggers who did the most damage to Anthony Weiner during the 2011 scandal was Patterico who — just coincidentally, FYI — was also a target of relentless harassment by the obscure alliance of forces that we call Team Kimberlin. Today, Patterico returns to the saga with a devastating timeline of how Weiner’s enablers made this latest scandal possible, and don’t miss this:

And, disturbingly for a guy who was talking about “cape and tights” to a high school girl in Delaware — a grooming line he had used with an adult woman with whom he had sexted — Weiner asks Sydney Leathers if her “pussy” is “smooth” . . .

Oh, my goodness. That seems rather weird, eh?

And while the New York Times sees a pattern, they apparently can’t be bothered to notice that pattern.

Do we know anyone else reputed to have a similar interest in young girls? Seems to ring a bell for some reason . . .

UPDATE: Linked at American Power — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers! Since this involves a mass readership who may be unfamiliar with the background to which I’ve alluded, let me briefly rehash what regular readers of this blog already know:

The seeming convergence of (a) Brett Kimberlin’s Enemies List and (b) a number of bloggers — including Ace of Spades and Lee Stranahan — who had written about WeinerGate could be explained as entirely coincidental. But there were reports that Team Weiner, in planning his political comeback effort, had engaged the services of various lawyers, researchers and consultants. Those of us who know how politics works behind the scenes are well aware that money is fungible: If Politician W hires Consulting Firm X for $20,000, this firm may then hire Freelance Researcher Y for $5,000 and Internet Operative Z for $3,000 on a basis of confidentiality, so that the activities of Y and Z cannot be traced to X, and Politician W then has clean hands (and plausible deniability) if Y and Z get caught red-handed.

Also: Progressives into young girls? Probably just a coincidence.

 


Epic New Failure: DailyKos Re-Banishes Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt

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Bill Schmalfeldt: Victim of a right-wing smear job?

“Attempting to convince a madman that he is out of his mind is a hopeless task . . .”
— Robert Stacy McCain, June 16

Bill Schmalfeldt can never seem to comprehend that the main cause — if not the only cause — of his problems is Bill Schmalfeldt.

Let us agree that a troll must cross a high threshold of obnoxiousness to be deemed Too Disgusting for Daily Kos, yet Schmalfeldt cleared the mark with surprising ease, thanks to his extraordinarily perverse discourse about butt sex. (C’mon, click this link. Double-dog dare ya.)

Banned from DKos in May 2012 as “Bill Schmalfeldt,” he attempted to return to DKos as “Patriot Ombudsman,” reposting something tedious he had published elsewhere about his legal battle with John Hoge. Schmalfeldt prefaced this weird tale (referring to himself in third-person) by describing it as a “story of a reputation ruined beyond repair by right wing nut jobs for no reason other than they wanted to.” Schmalfeldt claimed to be the victim of “a coordinated smear attack by the blowflies that buzz around the dessicated corpse of Andrew Breitbart.” And he included a screen-cap of my July 12 post, “Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt Inspires Epic ‘Downfall’ Parody Video.”

What he was attempting to do, as any psychologist would recognize, is blame-shifting: Bill is not responsible for the bad thing that happened; Bill is a helpless victim of what they did to him. (For those not familiar with mental health problems, it may help to read about “Locus of Control,” and also to understand that a disturbance in the sense of agency is typical of schizophrenia.)

Only examination by a trained clinical specialist, of course, could determine if Bill Schmalfeldt is suffering from mental illness, but you don’t need a Ph.D. to conclude that he is nuts, wacko, berserk, demented, zany, bonkers, batshit crazy and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Insofar as Bill Schmalfeldt had his “reputation ruined,” it was he who ruined it, not any “right wing nut jobs.” There were no “coordinated smear attacks,” but merely a series of responses to Schmalfeldt’s own obnoxious actions. If Schmalfeldt imagined that he could insult, disparage and harass others without the targets of these attacks ever reacting to defend themselves, well, he’s crazy.

But I think we’ve already established that, eh?

The origins and history of this episode are easily determined. On June 3, 2012, four days after Brett Kimberlin had Aaron Walker briefly arrested at a hearing in Maryland, Bill Schmalfeldt popped up on Twitter trying to bait Walker into commenting on Kimberlin. This coincidence — the judge on May 29, 2012, ordered Walker not to write about Kimberlin — escaped my notice until Walker pointed it out.

Was this “coordinated”? Had someone acting at Kimberlin’s behest urged Schmalfeldt to interrogate Walker, in an attempt to get Walker to violate the judge’s order, so as to provide Kimberlin with a new pretext for legal action against Walker? I have never claimed that this was the case, although Walker himself is certainly suspicious.

Let others speculate about motives, I merely describe what happened. Over the course of several months, Bill Schmalfeldt’s online harassment escalated, and always directed at antagonists of Kimberlin.

At one point (during Thanksgiving weekend), Schmalfeldt sent me more than 200 hostile Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours. But certainly the worst was Schmalfeldt’s maniacal online attacks against Lee Stranahan, a hateful spree that included shockingly vile writings about Stranahan’s wife and children. Stranahan eventually filed charges of harassment against Schmalfeldt, but the charges were dismissed. However, because John Hoge had given Stranahan a ride from the airport (Stranahan flew from Texas to Baltimore to file charges), Schmalfeldt then turned his obsessive rage against Hoge, which led eventually to Hoge getting a peace order against Schmalfeldt.

Schmalfeldt initiated the conflict, Schmalfeldt escalated the conflict, and at any time Schmalfeldt could have ended the conflict simply by ceasing his relentless attacks against Kimberlin’s enemies. For Schmalfeldt then to use Daily Kos to claim that he was victimized “by right wing nut jobs for no reason other than they wanted to” expresses a belief so far from reality that it can only be called delusional.

And what do we call people with delusional beliefs? Crazy.

Schmalfeldt has now been banned again at Daily Kos, and some of the comments by the DKos regulars are enlightening :

Anyone wondering why this troll was banned the first time should read [Schmalfeldt’s May 2012 post about anal sex].
He posts stupid attempts at humor, often offensive, and gets pissy when he is not heralded as a comedic genius.
When Tree Climbers objected to the language of the POS excerpted above, merely asking for a trigger warning, he mocked them and tried to “out” their charity.
Cried about it in another diary as well.

He was horrible in the comments and deserves no mercy this go round.

i recall he wanted to do a story on a fellow kossack (something about exposing things at her place of work). he harassed and pressured her, and clearly ‘stalked’ her. demeaned her…because she wouldn’t give him the story that would likely elevate him to the levels of woodward/bernstein…or something.
creepy.

Oh shit! Did anyone’s creepy meter go off? Mine sure did. Writing about yourself in third person should automatically come with a warning label.

These are comments from stalwart progressives, not “right wing nut jobs,” not by anyone with any political sympathy for Aaron Walker or Lee Stranahan or any of Schmalfeldt’s other targets. The fact is that Schmalfeldt’s online behavior has been atrocious enough that he has made himself persona non grata even among his own ideological allies. No “coordinated smear” was involved. Bill Schmalfeldt is just crazy.

But I’m pretty sure I mentioned that earlier . . .




 

 


‘One Takes Fun Where One Finds It’

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Remember when people told us that the Internet was a magical instrument that would enlighten the masses? Those “visionaries” of the Information Age failed to perceive what would be the result of granting worldwide communication access to stupid people: Trolls.

Trolls are stupid. Otherwise, they would not be trolls. Ken White is not stupid. Otherwise, he would not be a successful blogger.

So guess what predictably simple mistake a stupid troll makes when sending an obscenity-crammed e-mail Ken White?

(Hint: Your tax dollars at work.)