The Other McCain

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

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

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 68 Comments

“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.

 

Category: Andrew Breitbart, Anthony Weiner, The Kimberlin Files

The Game That Homey Does Not Play

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 50 Comments

Homey says, ‘I don’t think so.’

A friend e-mailed me in reference to Matt Osborne‘s (absurd) claim that the identity of someone calling himself “Watchful Avenger” is a matter crucial to the Brett Kimberlin story. Having never paid any attention to this at all, I replied to the e-mail:

It’s ridiculous, of course, for anyone to make a big deal over who the “Avenger” is. Certainly I never paid attention to that, and if anyone did, they did so without asking me about it. About two or three days into this story, back in May 2012, I realized that trying to figure out which actual person was behind any particular online “persona” was a fool’s errand. Neal Rauhauser loves to play that childish “you-can’t-prove-it” game: Bait people into making accusations that he is behind a certain sockpuppet account and then, quicker than you can say “plausible deniability,” Neal turns that into “evidence” that the person who makes the accusation is a paranoid conspiracy theorist, an unserious person with no credibility. So I don’t play that game, just like I never respond to any of Bill Schmalfeldt’s “evidence” against Kimberlin’s enemies, myself included. I know the motive for that game, and I don’t play it.
We don’t have to play dumb, of course. The only reason — the ONLY reason — Matt Osborne name-checked me in that item yesterday was in an effort to preemptively discredit me (in the eyes of whatever “progressives” pay attention to Osborne). And this is not just a random coincidence, of course.
Developments in the Kimberlin v. Kimberlin case, especially Tetyana’s claim that Brett illegally had sex with her when she was 15, are newsworthy enough that it’s getting more difficult for mainstream journalists or left-wing bloggers to keep ignoring it. There are people on the Left, as you know, who can’t stand Neal Rauhauser, and Osborne has his enemies, too. Whereas that little crew (including Karoli) were able to keep a lid on it before, so that the whole thing could be dismissed as just a “right wing nut job” story, now it might start getting a bit of traction.
Also, of course, there’s the latest Weiner scandal, which provides a potential news hook for revisiting the whole “Weiner Truther” phenomenon, of which Rauhauser was unquestionably the ringleader. OK, so if any good reporter started digging around into the two-year Weiner rehabilitation effort that preceded his NYC mayoral campaign, what would they find? The not-exactly-mysterious SWATtings of Neal Rauhauser’s enemies — who just so happened to be involved in exposing WeinerGate in 2011 — and the plausible suspicion that this was somehow connected to Brett Kimberlin’s anti-Breitbart crusade.
Is it a coincidence, then, that Matt Osborne jumped out there smearing me and Lee Stranahan and Aaron Walker immediately after Tetyana made her damaging accusations against Brett? Coincidence, my ass. They’re worried. And they should be worried.
— RSM

Having not paid any attention before, however, I did a quick Google search and discovered that this is actually relevant because (a) Brett Kimberlin took a photo of Aaron Walker’s wife in March, and (b) the photo was posted online by “The Watchful Avenger”:

“The Watchful Avenger” is what they have taken to calling calling this “Breitbart Unmasked” character on Twitter and the “publisher” of the Breitbart Unmaksed Blog.  Schmalfeldt is specifically referring to photographs of me taken at the courthouse and now you know who took them: Brett Kimberlin.  So Brett Kimberlin owns Breitbart Unmasked, which unsurprisingly means that he has perjured himself when claiming he doesn’t blog or use twitter.

OK, simple question: How did this photo, taken by Brett Kimberlin, get onto the Internet? It’s one thing to deny that X is Y. It is another thing to prove that X is not Y, in any equation where the identity of Y is unknown. If Brett took the photo, did he send that photo to someone whose identity he does not even know?

Yeah, right.  Matt Osborne hasn’t explained this, because he can’t explain it, nor will Matt Obsorne bother to explain his sudden interest this week in attacking Brett Kimberlin’s enemies. But surely he doesn’t think we are stupid, does he? Final suggestions:

Homey says, “Fuck you, Matt Osborne.”

 

Category: The Kimberlin Files

Wretched Chattanooga Newspaper Fires Editor Because of Anti-Obama Headline

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 45 Comments

The citizens of Chattanooga are afflicted with a paper owned by the same crowd of truthless swindlers who own the New York Times:

“The headline was inappropriate for this newspaper. It was not the original headline approved for publication, and Johnson violated the normal editing process when he changed the headline.”

The Times-Free Press is a disgrace to any fish unfortunate enough to be wrapped in it. Parakeets become constipated if you line their cage with it — they don’t consider it worthy of their droppings.

 


Category: Journalism

Oh, My: Anthony Weiner Porn Movie?

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 29 Comments

“Boom-chick-a-wow-wow,” says Aleister at American Glob, reporting the news that the tawdry tale of the would-be Mayor of New York’s online affairs could become THE MUST-SEE PORN FLICK OF THE YEAR, starring typical Democrat girl Sydney Leathers.

“I laughed! I cried! It was better than ‘Cats’!”

UPDATE: Sometimes the jokes just write themselves:

 

Category: Anthony Weiner, Scandal, Sex

21 Books, Part II

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 18 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Continuing the list of books that had a major influence on my life. Comments, suggestions and book plugs welcome, as always. A couple of the more noteworthy suggestions from last week’s post were Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (oddly, the Kindle edition is more expensive than the paperback) and The Other Side of Time: A Combat Surgeon In World War II by Brendan Phibbs.


Hammer’s Slammers, David Drake
“Your family and I go back a long way, Lady. Did you know that I shot your father on Melpomone? Between the eyes, so he could see it coming.”
I first read “Under the Hammer” in my high school library’s copy of Galaxy Science Fiction and its sequel “But Loyal To His Own” (to which the above line, from “Standing Down”, refers) a month or so later, and I was hooked forever. Drake’s work has been criticized by some for being “carnographic conservative military SF” but in truth the exploits of the Auxiliary Regiment commanded by Alois Hammer are based on the real-life history of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam, a unit David Drake and I both served in (at thirty years remove, mind you) and don’t show a lot of sympathy for politicians of any stripe. Jim Baen saw the stories for what they were, which was well-written SF, and the series grew to the point where the new collection in hardback from Night Shade Press takes up three volumes. Hammer’s men (and women, for the most part) are complicated characters; there’s a lot more going on with them than just filling a role in a tale of combat, and that’s especially true of Joachim Steuben, the rather flaming and extremely deadly commander of Hammer’s military police company, the White Mice. Suffice it to say I’ve barely begun to describe the character.
Quite aside from their literary merits, the Hammer’s Slammers stories got me interested in David Drake’s writing, and while I haven’t yet picked up his fantasy works I daresay I’ve read (and own) pretty much everything else he’s written in the SF and horror genres. He’s also one hella interesting person in the flesh.


Fields of Fire, James Webb
“We are all sucking wind out here, L-T.”
This is a hard book to describe, because there’s a hell of a lot going on. Much like his later sociological treatise Born Fighting, Fields of Fire covers a lot of history as background to its main story, the tale of Lieutenant Robert E. Lee Hodges, a young Marine lieutenant whose family has fought in nearly all of America’s wars and who now heads off to Vietnam as a platoon leader in the I Corps zone. It’s also the story of Snake, Senator, Ogre, Bagger, Dan, Cat Man, and the rest of Hodges’ platoon, a story of revenge, betrayal, and deadly combat against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. It’s not a pretty story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. In fact, it has multiple unhappy endings. There’s a lot of story packed into the ~500 pages of Webb’s debut novel, and I can’t recommend it enough.


The Shadow Over Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft
“Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet his eyes no more, an’ is all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’ll take to the water soon.”
Thus Zadok Allen describes one of the leading citizens of the New England city of Innsmouth, the site of the action in The Shadow over Innsmouth, which was actually not a novel but a collection of Lovecraft stories published by Scholastic Book Services back in the late 1960s. Coming from a family that hailed from the northeast end of Massachusetts, I had no trouble imagining the decrepit city and the horrors that lurked behind the shuttered windows. This book set the hook in me, and over the subsequent years I snatched up every bit of Lovecraft I could find, even the tales adulterated by August Derleth into novels; even today, the Cthulhu Mythos and its several contemporary authors continue to fascinate me.


The River And The Gauntlet, S.L.A. Marshall
S.L.A. Marshall’s reputation was pretty huge when he was alive, but diminished quickly as it became apparent to other historians that he hadn’t let little things like the facts get in the way of a good story. Which makes me wonder how much of The River and the Gauntlet, a gripping account of Eighth Army’s retreat from the Yalu River in the winter of 1950-51 is supported by the facts…anyhow, at the time that I read this book it was pretty gripping. I hadn’t delved very much into American military history at that point and had yet to become familiar with such disasters as the siege of Bataan, the Crater incident during the Civil War, and the opening engagements of what would become the Battle of the Bulge. Marshall’s account of the Chinese intervention in Korea was a real eye-opener, and whetted my appetite for more of the same. Unfortunately, Battles in the Monsoon, his best-known work on Vietnam, wasn’t nearly as good, and I never bothered to read his other histories after that. Still, I have to give Marshall credit for getting me more interested in military history, and the Korean War (to say nothing of other things Korean) in particular.


Retief’s War , Keith Laumer
“I is a great believer in peaceful settlements. Ain’t nobody as peaceful as a dead trouble-maker.”
As a former Air Force officer turned diplomat, Keith Laumer was well-equipped to tell the rollicking tales of Jame Retief of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, an unorthodox fellow who often found himself fighting with his own superiors as much (or more) than he did the enemies of Terra, be they uncooperative natives or the five-eyed Groaci. Probably the best of all Retief’s adventures is the novel Retief’s War, serialized in Worlds of If back in 1965 – which is where I first saw it, or at least its second half. (That same issue had the first part of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with a memorable Gray Morrow cover.) Anyhow, Retief’s War takes place on the planet Quopp, where the locals are made mostly of metallic chitin and get ripped on sugar products. In one memorable scene, two Quoppina of the Voion tribe are completely undone by a jar of Terran honey our hero has hidden for just such a situation. The Terran mission is about to fumble its way into disaster, until Retief escapes in disguise to rouse the anarchic bush tribes against the would-be imperialist Voion…who happen to be getting some under-the-table support from a certain bunch of five-eyed, sticky-fingered aliens who have (nefarious!) plans of their own for Quopp. It’s a great adventure, full of swashes getting buckled, diplomatic derring-do, good old-fashioned brawling, misplaced educational supplies, plus a shipload or gorgeous women who aren’t averse to picking up a sword and kicking some butt themselves when the occasion calls for it. Of course, this novel started a decades-long fascination with Laumer’s works.
NB: The novel is now available as part of a comprehensive anthology of Laumer’s Retief stories from Baen, simply titled Retief! An outstanding deal on the Kindle, I must say.


From Here to Eternity, James Jones
“Got paid out on Monday, ain’t a dog soljer no more…”
There’s a lot to this book, and if you only know it through the (rather good) 1953 movie then you don’t really know it at all. It’s been called the best novel about the pre-World War II Army out there, and insofar as it gives an unsparing portrait of the Hawaiian Division before the war that may be true, but that really dates it far too much. Where the book really shines is in its equally unsparing look at the kind of men who enlist in a peacetime army and the kind of men who run that army, and that’s not always a very pretty picture. My father got the copy I now have as part of a set with The Caine Mutiny and The Naked and the Dead, neither of which are anywhere near as good as this. Well, Herman Wouk’s book, maybe; certainly on average Wouk was a much better writer than Jones, as a quick comparison of The Thin Red Line and The Winds of War will tell you. I probably read this for the first time when I was far too young to understand it properly or fit it into the right context, but there you are. Holds up very well to multiple re-readings.


The Revolt of Gunner Asch(’08/15 Im Kaserne), Hans Helmut Kirst
“We must congratulate Gunner Asch on his promotion to Corporal, Lieutenant.”
I don’t buy a lot of foreign books in the original language. I made an exception for Hans Hellmut Kirst’s ’08/15 im Kaserne (The Revolt of Gunner Asch) and its sequels, which I read in their Pyramid translations back in sixth grade. These were pretty remarkable books, depicting as they did the Wehrmacht in a very unsentimental light as an organization capable of driving its own junior NCOs to rebellion in the name of justice. Kirst had a gift for producing memorable, sympathetic characters, and even though I haven’t cracked these in years I can still see Asch, Vierbein, Lieutenant Wedelmann, and Colonel Luschke as if I’d just put the books down yesterday. Kirst also wrote a whole mess of other books about the Wehrmacht, of which The Night of the Generals is perhaps best known thanks to the movie, but these are his first, arguably his best.


Category: Books

‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran: I Love This Bitch

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Austin Price over at Fishbowl DC writes:

For Abby the Shih Tzu mix, Tuesday was a big day. Until last Friday, when she was picked up by animal shelter Homeward Trails, she had been roaming the streets of Washington. On Tuesday, however, Abby got a chance to find a new home at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal’s Paws for Celebration adoption drive (yes, that was a mouthful) in the Cannon Caucus Room.

<= Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va), co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, spoke to the crowd while holding Butter, who stole the show. Moran encouraged everyone present to adopt a pet, noting that one of his staffers did just that. (From FishbowlDC article)

I, for one, rejoice that Moran could take a break from the day trading to express more concern for strays than the unborn. Somewhat less snarkily, this is what you do if you want to stay elected: go make friends with pet owners who have vast amounts of cash to spend keeping you in office, while blowing off any sort of leadership role entirely.

It’s not fair to say that Moran is, to politics, what Wally is to the Dilbert cartoon strip; Wally at least affords an occasional guffaw. Moran and the rest of the senior leadership in DC continue to epitomize the truth that, while the Founders served up some great mechanism, there was no guarantee that sound policy would ensue. That’s on us.

One hopes that the Almighty will coax Patrick Murray to run again in 2014. Not to wish an ill fate on Moran, but the sooner Jim’s political career ends, the sooner we can set about avoiding Detroit as a national destiny.

In closing, let’s cast our mind back to an era before the likes of Moran blighted our politics:

Email hat tip to Paco

Category: Democrats, Virginia

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 08.01.13

Posted on | August 1, 2013 | 10 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Uruguay’s House Passes Marijuana Legalization Bill

Dopers want bill passed quickly

Would make pot a government monopoly

Filner’s Lawyer Insists San Diego Liable For Client’s Fees
Says mayor didn’t get sexual harassment training

Protests Continue In Andhra Pradesh Over Telangana Creation
Split spurs demand for creation of other new Indian states



POLITICS
NYC Mayoral Hopefuls Adjust To Weiner’s Sudden Limpness

Barbara Morgan, Anthony Weiner

Candidate stands by foul-mouthed flack after her tirade against tell-all intern


Wikileaker’s Court-Martial Enters Sentencing Phase


Christie Douses Talk Of Beer Summit With Paul

NSA Program Allegedly Allows Analysts To Track E-mails, Chats, Web Searches

Obama Defends Summers To Congressional Democrats; Not Close To Fed Chair Decision

Midnight Ceremonies As Two States Legalize Gay Marriage

Pentagon Warns Of Tough Tradeoffs As Budget Cuts Loom



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Prices Rise As Fed Sticks With Stimulus: NYMEX $105.37, Brent $107.87
Is No News From Draghi Good News For Eurozone Recovery?
Asian Stocks Rally With European Futures On PRC PMI, Yen Drop
Swipe-Fee Rule Rejection To Help Merchants At Banks’ Expense
Economy Grew 1.7% In Second Quarter
Facebook Embraces The Internet With Embedded Posts
As Yelp Expands Into Commerce, Business Stays Focused On Local
Zynga Sues Maker Of “Bang With Friends”
Starbucks Expands Wireless Charging, Teams Up With Google For Faster Wi-Fi
Google Makes Web TV Look Easy With Chromecast
Sony Q1 Results See Declining Playstation Sales Offset By Weak Yen



SPORTS
Eagles’ Riley Cooper Apologizes For Racial Slur

Caught using N-word at Kenny Chesney concert

Fined heavily for drunken comment

Rangers Sweep Angels With Third Straight Walk-Off Dinger

Snakes Send Kennedy To Padres For Thatcher

John Wall Signs Five-Year, $80 Million Deal With Wizards


A-Rod Reportedly Negotiating Suspension With MLB

Castro’s Grand Slam Lifts Astros Over O’s

NFL Scraps NFL/AFL Format For Pro Bowl, Will Draft Teams Instead

From Iraq To The NFL: Cardinals Cheerleader Also Veteran

Avila, Hunter Homer In Tigers’ 11-1 Rout Of Nationals



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Jodie Sweetin: I Am NOT In Rehab!

Just a worker, not a patient

Former “Full House” star working as logistics coordinator at rehab facility

Simon Cowell Expecting Baby With Friend’s Wife

Rob Lowe, Rashida Jones Leaving “Parks And Recreation”

Judge Orders More Therapy For Lindsay Lohan

Justin Bieber Cleared Of Hit & Run Charges

Time For A “Buffy” Movie Kickstarter Campaign? Sarah Michelle Gellar Weighs In

Miley Cyrus Says BFF Britney Spears Is “The One Person In My Life Who Gets It”

Ariel Winter’s Mom Loses Bid To Reunite With Daughter

Paul Haggis Writes Open Letter Praising Leah Remini’s Break With Co$

Jim Murray Joins Syfy’s “Defiance”



FOREIGNERS
Zimbabwe Opposition Alleges “Monumental Fraud” In Election
Japan Deputy PM Retracts Nazi Remarks
Assad Claims He’ll Defeat Rebels
Spanish PM Faces Cortes On Corruption Scandal
US Invites Pakistani PM For Talks With Obama
Aussie Nursing Home Arsonist Gets Life In Prison
Philly Gays, Catholics Say Pope’s Big Change Is One Of Tone
UN chemical Weapons Inspectors To Visit Syrian Sites
Fugitive Former Kazakh Banker Arrested In France
Swedish Serial Killer Who Raped, Ate His Victims To Be Freed – He Made It All Up
As Egypt Turns Up The Heat, MuBros Struggle For Strategy



BLOGS & STUFF
Michelle Malkin: Vacationer Obama’s Favorite Vineyard “Vulture”
Twitchy: Sniveling Maggot Jay Carney Dismisses Benghazi, IRS As “Phony Scandals”
Power Line: The Christie-Paul Fight, And Other Fights To Come
Weasel Zippers: Pew Poll – Majority Of GOP Voters Want Party To be More Conservative
Allahpundit: GOP Voters Have A Fever, And The Only Cure Is…Paul Ryan?
Jawa Report: CNN Lands Coveted Interview With Benghazi Terrorists
American glob: Democrats Descend Into Civil War After Divisive Obama Comments
Weekly Standard Blog: Ted Cruz Says Votes Aren’t There In House Or Senate to Defund Obamacare
George Will: Detroit’s Death By Democracy
NRO Cornr: Sarah Palin PAC Fundraising Down
PJ Tatler: Wars On Women Among The Women In Weinerland
Michael Walsh: “No-Government” Conservatives And The Meta-Narrative
Benno Schmidt: Mitch Daniels’ Gift To Academic Freedom
Victor Davis Hanson: The Death Of Populism


Category: Live at Five

Where the Brett Kimberlin Story Started UPDATE: Neal Rauhauser’s ‘TwitterGate’

Posted on | July 31, 2013 | 89 Comments

Today, I found myself scratching my head at accusations made by liberal blogger Matt Osborne to the effect that the Brett Kimberlin story is actually about Kimberlin’s enemies:

Correspondents like Robert Stacy McCain and Lee Stranahan lack any journalistic integrity, however, which is why they spew these fables at high volume and then insist they are only being ignored because of Brett Kimberlin’s sinister, unseen stranglehold on the media. It’s all a conspiracy!

Two words for you, Matt: Seth Allen.

Because if you want to trace this thing back to its beginning, you don’t start with me or Lee Stranahan or Aaron Walker or anybody else on the Right, you start with Seth Allen, an eccentric liberal blogger who doesn’t like me and doesn’t like Republicans or capitalism, but who also doesn’t like Brett Kimberlin. That’s an important fact to keep in mind when you ask yourself, “What is the Brett Kimberlin story really about?”

A good place to start the story is on Dec. 11, 2009, when Seth Allen published a blog post titled, “Brad Friedman and Fake News Making News.” Please click that link and read it carefully, because Seth Allen recognized something very important: Brett Kimberlin’s 501(c)4 group Velvet Revolution (VR) was fundamentally a scam.

VR exploited conspiracy-theory fears on the Left and made unsubstantiated accusations against the Left’s pet bogeymen (e.g., Karl Rove) and, with the promotional assistance provided by Friedman’s BradBlog, was able to turn this in a modestly successful fundraising operation: $83,560 in 2008, $77,963 in 2010.

Seth Allen pointed out (a) that VR never really accomplished anything, and (b) VR founder Brett Kimberlin is a convicted felon. Seth Allen pointed that out in December 2009 — nearly four years ago — shortly after Judson Berger of Fox News reported this:

Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue is a wanted man — at least according to the liberal activist group that’s put a de facto bounty on his head.
A network of liberal groups known as Velvet Revolution started an ad campaign offering $200,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the man whose trade organization has become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.
The group is not leveling any specific charges of criminal behavior. Rather, it is casting a wide net, fishing for any whistleblowers from Donohue’s past who might come forward with allegations of wrongdoing. The campaign against the Chamber was launched in response to the group’s opposition to climate change legislation and health care reform, and its plan to spend $100 million lobbying against these and other initiatives.
“On every issue, the Chamber is kind of the lead corporate advocate for the status quo,” said Kevin Zeese, a lawyer who sits on the board for Velvet Revolution, calling Donohue a “knee-jerk reactionary” and the Chamber a “right-wing extremist group.”

It had nothing to do, you see, with Andrew Breitbart or any of the other right-wing enemies that Brett Kimberlin’s defenders have tried to vilify in the months since “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day.” Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution had targeted the Chamber of Commerce, had offered a reward (to create publicity for their anti-Chamber campaign) and were milking the whole thing for cash.

That was December 2009, and Seth Allen called “bullshit” on it:

Brett Kimberlin Productions has an interesting business model. They basically attempt to inspire donations through offers of substantial rewards for whistleblowers from tips leading to arrests and convictions for fraud. I’ve yet to see one example where this has ever led to such a result. A few years ago they were offering $250,000 for tips leading to an election fraud conviction. That type of spiel has garnered money from philanthropist Lori Grace, heiress to the Oliver Grace fortune. . . .  We can see how the conspiracy chatter has filtered on down throughout the “progressive” blogosphere, despite there being zero evidence of any merit to the allegations.

Seth Allen also pointed out that, after Fox News ran its story about VR’s anti-Chamber campaign, Brad Friedman turned that into a blog post about how VR was flooded with hateful e-mail, which he said had been turned over to the FBI and, oh, by the way, “If you’d like to ‘push back’ against the thuggery, you can sign on in support of VR’s ‘Stop The Chamber’ campaign here.”

See how easy this is? Attack the right-wing bogeyman Chamber of Commerce, and when your attack attracts attention from Fox News, leverage your left-wing readership’s hatred of Fox News for even more donations. Oh, yeah, and sign up people for an e-mail list so that you can send them more fundraising appeals in the future. All of which is perfectly legal, but is also a scam, because VR never seems to do anything else except make accusations and raise money.

Now, I intend to extend this story with a series of updates, explaining more of how this story developed, so readers may want to bookmark this page and refresh it every hour or so, or come back tomorrow morning when I’m through. Matt Osborne’s absurd bullshit –accusing me of lacking “journalistic integrity” — deserves a thorough rebuttal. What did Professor Reynolds say?

Somebody is trying to out-crazy Stacy McCain? That’s not going to end well . . . .

Conspiracy, my ass. He chose poorly.

UPDATE: On July 4, 2010, Kevin Zeese — the same Velvet Revolution lawyer who called  the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a “right-wing extremist group” — sent a letter to Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, with the subject line “Request For Prosecution Of James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart For Violating Maryland’s Privacy Statute,” accusing Breitbart of criminal conspiracy:

I also call upon your office to bring the conspiracy charges against Andrew Breitbart for paying and directing O’Keefe and Giles and then directly carrying out the distribution of the illegally obtained tapes, also a felony under applicable Maryland law. Mr. Breitbart is the director of BigGovernment.com, an Internet website that pushes far right propaganda and he has used the ACORN tapes as a fundraising tool for his operations.

Once again, as with Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce, VR made lurid accusations of criminal wrongdoing by right-wing bogeymen, which never resulted in anything except fundraising and publicity for Velvet Revolution. If these bastards thought they could run their dishonest hustle against Breitbart without consequence, well, they chose poorly. On Oct. 11, 2010, Breitbart published Mandy “Liberty Chick” Nagy’s 3,600-word exposé of Kimberlin’s criminal background, “Progressives Embrace Convicted Terrorist.”

To this day, nearly three years later, Mandy’s article remains the definitive resource for anyone wanting to learn about Kimberlin’s criminal history, and that article was like tipping over the first domino. When Patterico published his own post about Kimberlin, Kimberlin responded with an e-mail threatening to sue Patterico:

Please take this email as an intent to sue you for your Oct 11, 2010 post on Patterico.com which has defamed and libeled me. I have just sued Socrates on which you rely for cyber stalking, defamation, libel, violation of privacy and interference with business. Socrates has been banned from many sites and forums for stalking many people including me. He is under criminal investigation for cyber bullying and cyber stalking. By corresponding with him and relying on his defamatory posts, you are conspiring with him and are just as liable as he.

Kimberlin also sent a similar threat to Mandy Nagy. Notice Kimberlin’s accusation that they were “conspiring with” Socrates (Seth Allen’s online moniker). But the story could be independently verified from multiple published sources, including accounts of Kimberlin’s crimes in the Indianapolis Star, a 2007 article by Time magazine’s Massimo Calabresi and Mark Singer’s 1996 book, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin.

Bottom line: There was no way Kimberlin could win a libel action for truthful reporting based on solid sources.

His threat was simply that — a threat, an attempt to intimidate Patterico and Nagy. Notice also the typical “Accuse the Accusers” motif Kimberlin employs in his effort to discredit Seth Allen: “He is under criminal investigation for cyber bullying and cyber stalking.”

This is a tactic that everyone who has ever dealt with Kimberlin learns to expect: He will attempt to confuse the uninformed observer by making accusations, so that the story is no longer about him, but rather about what terrible people his enemies are.

Kimberlin may deceive some people, but he has never deceived me.

UPDATE II: Patterico wishes to make a point:

There is no love lost between these two, but this is important to understand: Nobody has to admire Seth Allen or agree with Seth Allen in order to recognize the role Seth Allen played in the development of this story. You don’t have to like me or admire me, either. In fact, you can think all of us — Seth Allen, Patrick Frey, Mandy Nagy, Aaron Walker, Lee Stranahan, et al. — are a bunch of assholes.

So what? Who cares? This isn’t a story about us, it’s a story about Brett Kimberlin, and here is something very important to consider:

“Brett Kimberlin is a terrorist. While I firmly believe in the doctrine of redemption and conversion, I remember a few things about Brett that give me great pause.
“First, he was convicted of perjury — in federal court — before he got out of high school. Think about that for a moment.
“Second, he was not convicted of smoking a couple of joints when he was in high school. He was a major drug dealer who officials believe got into terrorism to throw officials off the trail of a murder.”
— Joe Gelarden, Jan. 9, 2007

Brett Kimberlin is profoundly dishonest. Go read the reviews of Mark Singer’s 1996 book, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, which describe Kimberlin as “a top-flight con man” (Publisher’s Weekly), “a fairly typical hustler” (Library Journal) and “a man whose idea of the truth is utterly malleable . . . a dangerous smooth talker” (Kirkus Reviews). If you are interested in finding the truth about Brett Kimberlin, you must begin with the knowledge that you can’t trust a word Brett Kimberlin says.

UPDATE III: Returning to the narrative, Kimberlin never sued Patrick “Patterico” Frey or Mandy Nagy for libel, but he did sue Seth Allen. Kimberlin’s resources are not meager. In the five years 2006-2010, Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c)3 non-profit Justice Through Music Project raised more than $1.6 million, including more than $220,000 in 2010. And waging “lawfare” against Brett Kimberlin’s enemies — well, hey, that could be considered “social justice” work, I guess. So at any rate, we’ll let Aaron Walker tell the story a while:

Kimberlin had sued a blogger/commenter named Seth Allen in the Montgomery County, Maryland lawsuit known as Kimberlin v. Allen (case number 339254v).  . . .
Seth ended up with a default judgment against him [because he failed to respond to Kimberlin’s libel suit] and on August 22 and 23, 2011, he was looking for help. And because I kind of lived kind of close to where this was going on, he sought out my help. The problem was that I am not an attorney in Maryland, so I couldn’t do very much for him.  But I briefly provided him a little legal advice. . . . And that was the end of it.  Or so I thought.
But Brett Kimberlin learned that I had provided Seth that brief, slight, free legal help and that was enough to make me a target of his anger.
The Maryland case went on. There was a hearing on November 14, 2011, to determine what damages would be awarded to Kimberlin for this supposed defamation.  You can read the transcript of that hearing, here. He was awarded the grand sum total of…  $100, and court costs, which resulted in much mockery from Patrick. But Kimberlin was also given an injunction that commanded that Seth shall never defame Kimberlin or tortiously interfere with his business relations. And as he is wont to do, Kimberlin very quickly decided that Seth had violated this order and demanded that Seth be held in contempt in a hearing set for January 9, 2012.

Here, now, is where it gets crazy. Seth Allen finds himself locked in this ridiculous legal battle with Kimberlin. Seth is trying to get whatever help he can get. Walker provides him with free advice, and then Kimberlin turns against Walker accusing him of conspiracy:

Kimberlin has gone on record as believing that I have been “conspiring with, advising, and aiding abetting [sic] Mr. Allen for over a year regarding” Seth telling the truth about Kimberlin’s deplorable past.  Mind you, he has no proof of this, and indeed no evidence of it.  All he has is evidence of contact, between a lawyer and a guy being sued, after he was sued, which isn’t even unusual when you think about it.  And he has indicated in conversations with my counsel, Beth Kingsley, that he believes that the conspiracy includes Andrew Breitbart and/or the Chamber of Commerce, but there is no word on whether he thinks the Freemasons are involved.

You can laugh at this, but it’s not really funny, because Aaron Walker ultimately lost his job as a direct result of being targeted by Kimberlin. And to understand what was really behind it, you need to click the link to read this document which includes this:

Who was paying cyberstalker Seth Allen? The pool of suspects seems limited to Aaron Worthing, Mandy Nagy, John Patrick Frey and Andrew Breitbart.

Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser wrote that, based on an Aug. 23, 2011 e-mail that Allen sent to Walker (a.k.a., “Aaron Worthing”), CC’ing Nagy, Frey and Breitbart. But there was no conspiracy and nobody was paying Allen, who is not a “cyberstalker.”

Lies, lies, lies — “Accuse the Accusers” again — but we’re getting ahead of the story, because I haven’t formally introduced Rauhauser, by whom this story is directly connected to WeinerGate.

UPDATE IV: The damnable thing about what Matt Osborne did, in trying to make this about me — or Lee Stranahan or Aaron Walker, et. al. — is that Osborne was taking advantage of the vast ignorance about this story on the Left. Osborne and a handful of others on the Left have deliberately obfuscated the facts, which are complicated enough without having to refute Osborne’s false claims that Walker (or anyone else) “has relentlessly pursued a bizarre vendetta against Mr. Kimberlin for years” — the exact opposite of the truth!

There is no “vendetta” except the ones Kimberlin has pursued against his enemies list, beginning with Seth Allen, and subsequently expanding to include Mandy Nagy, Patterico and Aaron Walker, who responded to Allen’s pleas for help. If you help Kimberlin’s enemies — and to become his enemy, all you have to do is tell the truth about Brett Kimberlin — then you will be accused of being part of a conspiracy against Kimberlin. Matt Osborne blithely accuses Aaron Walker and his friends of pursuing a “bizarre vendetta against Mr. Kimberlin for years,” but as for me, I never even heard the name “Brett Kimberlin” before May 17, 2012, when I saw Walker’s account of how he says Kimberlin tried to “frame” him for an assault charge. And all Walker had done to deserve that was to assist a left-wing blogger named Seth Allen, whom Kimberlin had sued.

This “Accuse the Accusers” tactic — a sort of narrative ju-jitsu, attempting to make it seem that Aaron Walker and others are responsible for Kimberlin’s actions against them — only works if you don’t understand the actual sequence of events:

  • July 2010 — Brett Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution demands that Andrew Breitbart be charged with a criminal conspiracy to violate Maryland law.
  • October 2010 — Breitbart publishes Mandy Nagy’s expose of Kimberlin. Brett Kimberlin accuses Nagy and Patrick “Patterico” Frey of being part of a criminal conspiracy with Seth Allen. Kimberlin threatens to sue both Nagy and Frey, and actually does sue Allen.
  • August 2011 — Aaron Walker provides free advice to Allen.
  • October 2011 — Neal Rauhauser accuses Walker, Nagy, Frey and Andrew Breitbart of conspiring with Allen against Kimberlin, based on documents that Rauhauser could only have obtained from Brett Kimberlin. Rauhauser writes (see page 9 here) that “given the duration of the stalking, the mental harm, and the financial damage to Kimberlin’s non-profit he will probably pursue Breitbart, Frey, Nagy, [Walker] until he gets satisfaction.”

“Satisfaction”? For what? Where is there any evidence that any of these people did any wrong for which Kimberlin could expect “satisfaction”? Kimberlin tried to have Breitbart indicted on a phony conspiracy charge, Kimberlin made bogus lawsuit threats against both Frey and Nagy, and took advantage of Allen’s negligence to get a default judgment against Allen, a left-wing blogger who simply got fed up with Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution bullshit.

For Matt Osborne to accuse others of conspiracy theories and vendettas is the exact opposite of truth, you see. And if you want to understand how Neal Rauhauser got involved in this, I’ve told that story before: “‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection.” But I’ll tell it again, because I’m starting to suspect Matt Osborne is too stupid to understand how to click a link.

UPDATE V: Neal Rauhauser is highly intelligent, but has numerous personality flaws, including a tendency to brag. In August 2010, Rauhauser described — publicly and in advance — his plans for an online war against the Tea Party, in two posts at the forum Open Left:

That was just weeks after Rauhauser was a speaker at the Netroots Nation conference, where he was listed thus in the schedule:

Rauhauser described his specialty as “solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.” What he described in those two August 2010 Open Left posts was a claim that he and other progressive “leaders” on Twitter were “subject to harassment and intimidation from the right,” which he declared was a “centrally initiated effort.” Rauhauser simply asserted this, and then explained what he planned to do in response:

I’ve personally taken an aggressive stance with my stalker and I’ve simultaneously put him under a bit of surveillance. I’ve openly declared that I’m hunting his handlers and I won’t engage in anything more than trading insults until I explore his connections and determine that hauling him into court is a gateway to identifying the source of the strategy.

So, according to Neal, there is this “stalker” on Twitter, who is part of a “centrally initiated effort” to harass and intimidate him and, in order to find “the source of the strategy,” Neal anticipates “hauling him into court,” for reasons he subsequently explained:

We’re dealing with people who have likely had no interaction with the court system beyond a traffic ticket; the potential for a pro se litigant to force them into expensive, long distance, lengthy, discovery laden litigation doesn’t seem to cross their minds. The reality of travel, or frightful expenses, or summary judgments needs to be made real. We probably need to make a very visible example of at least one of them before the rest understand.

In August 2010, Neal Rauhauser declared that he was looking for someone of whom he could “make a very visible example” through litigation — with malice aforethought, so to speak. And two days later, he expanded on his plan:

I want us to get up inside their network and collect actionable information.
As a civil outcome a suit penetrating the outer ring of crazy talkers, getting to their handlers, and then to the money men would be the final solution.

There were “handlers” and “money men” who were directing and funding the “crazy talkers” on Twitter, Rauhauser asserted, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. He went on to say that he was seeking evidence “admissible in both civil and criminal proceedings“:

A citizen knowledgeable as to the players in the various right wing cells in evidence on Twitter can dramatically reduce the work load for investigators and plaintiff’s lawyers, turning cases that might have been ignored into slam dunk wins.

What happened instead was something entirely different, an episode that became known as “TwitterGate,” in which Rauhauser was accused of organizing a crew of Twitter thugs to harass Tea Party activists, a mortifying embarrassment for Rauhauser. But you see that this basic germ of an idea, to pursue civil litigation and criminal prosecution against persons he accused of “harassment and intimidation,” in order to “make a very visible example of at least one of them” — well, the game plan was right there, in August 2010.

Three years ago, Rauhauser laid out his plan to identify “handlers” and “money men” behind a “centrally initiated effort” — i.e., a conspiracy — and that was before he had any association with Brett Kimberlin, or had ever heard of Aaron Walker, Patrick Frey or Mandy Nagy.

UPDATE VI: Having worked past 3 a.m. to produce the first 3,500 words of this, I awoke before noon with still more more of the tale to tell. But readers will expect me to have something to say about recent news — the rent is still too damn high — so I’ll have to find a stopping point soon and continue the story at a later time.

What happened in “TwitterGate” is essential to understanding why, when Neal Rauhauser became an “associate” of Brett Kimberlin in mid-2011, the harassment of Aaron Walker, Patrick Frey and others took the form it did. Rauhauser learned lessons from his 2010 embarrassment and put them to good use later.

The perpetrators of the “TwitterGate” harassment of Tea Party activists on Twitter were a group of accounts Rauhauser called his “Beandogs,” a term originating in a Japanese children’s cartoon described by Variety magazine in February 2010:

Japanese advertising giant Dent­su is looking to export “Mameshiba,” an entertainment property revolving around beans with puppy-dog faces, to the U.S. and turn what’s become a surprise hit in Asia into the next fad for teen and tween girls.

Grown-up fans of Japanese cartoons for “teen and tween girls”? Perhaps just another random coincidence. But the games Neal’s beandogs played on the Internet were not fit for children:


You can see more of these messages at my October 2010 post about TwitterGate, or at Catholic conservative Patrick Read’s blog. It was believed by Read, by Greg W. Howard and by others who witnessed this spree of obscene harassment, that Rauhauser was the mastermind of all this. And because Rauhauser was the lead partner in an online consulting firm that claimed several Democratic candidates as clients, it was believed that this harassment was funded (however indirectly) by Democrats. Such was the belief, at any rate, but good luck conclusively proving such a thing.

Whatever actually happened, however, Rauhauser’s role in it was abundantly clear to anyone who looked at the copious volume of screen-capped Twitter messages compiled by the conservatives who documented “TwitterGate.” This must be seen in the context of Rauhauser’s plan — announced to his leftist comrades in August — to entangle his targets in litigation or criminal prosecution. This obscene harassment, Greg Howard and others believed, was intended to provoke them into making death threats or otherwise doing something that would expose them to the kind of legal action Rauhauser contemplated, to “make a very visible example of at least one of them.”

Once this “beandog” scheme and Rauhauser’s involvement in it were exposed, however, Neal claimed to be a victim.

Using his “Stranded Wind” account at Daily Kos, Rauhauser wrote a post headlined, “Tea Party Stalks Me and My Kids.” The “threat . . . was directed at me because I’ve been effectively organizing on Twitter and the blogosphere,” Rauhauser wrote on Sept. 28, 2010. “Last weekend this cyberstalking overflowed into kooks discovering and sharing where my children live.”

This was a classic example of the “Accuse the Accusers” motif: Whereas the real story was about what Rauhauser and his “beandogs” had done to Greg W. Howard and other Tea Party activists on Twitter, the story Neal told to his progressive pals at Daily Kos was about how these “kooks” had been “cyberstalking” him. And when the story subsequently made headlines (see, for example, Scott Baker’s post at The Blaze, “Did Democrats Hire a ‘Twitter-Thug’ to Smear the Tea Party?”), Rauhauser played it off as a “prank” — which was a damnable lie, a deceitful cover story that Neal managed to convince Adrian Chen of Gawker to help publicize:

“Basically we’re a group of likeminded people who think Twitter is a place to kick back and have fun,” said Beandog Member Sam Birbeck, a 30-year-old from Adelaide, Australia. (Twitter handle: Methadonna.) . . .
“We’re a bunch of guys on Twitter trying to be funny and vulgar and offensive,” said one Beandog member from Florida who goes by the Twitter username TheRealSomebody. “Through that, we came across a lot of conservative people on Twitter. It was very easy to race-bait them and get them to say horribly racist things.”
Beandogs targeted Greg W. Howard, the Glenn Beck of Twitter, after Howard spearheaded the takedown of a highly-publicized anti-Glenn Beck account called @murderglennbeck. “The main reason he’s been such a consistent target is because he’s such a big mouth,” said Birbeck.
So, the Beandogs started tweeting vulgar things about Howard’s children and wife, spreading rumors about him and generally making his Twitter life miserable. Eventually one of the Beandogs dug up some embarrassing documents that revealed Howard’s financial planning business was in shambles, and that he was behind on his child support payments. The Beandogs consider this all a harmless prank.

Just a “harmless prank” that had nothing to do with Rauhauser, his “beandog” buddies told Adrian Chen, who accepted this alibi without any apparent skepticism. Chen then proceeded to portray the following as merely coincidental:

While Howard [led] the Wrecking Crew [as his Twitter posse of Tea Party friends called themselves] in battle against the Beandogs, he was simultaneously engaged in an intense ego clash with the left-wing blogger and social media consultant, Neal Rauhauser. It’s unclear exactly what their beef is. When I spoke to them on the phone, each offered impassioned arguments for why the other is engaged in a vast left/right-wing conspiracy. And both accused the other of cyberstalking and of having a hand in Internet death threats against them.
What’s clear is that at some point Rauhauser noticed that he and the Beandogs shared an enemy in Howard and started encouraging them on Twitter. The Beandogs in turn began pretending that Rauhauser was their leader, intimating that they were being paid by George Soros and generally playing on the Tea Party’s paranoia. Both the Beandogs and Rauhauser deny there’s any collusion, just mutual admiration between Tea Party tormentors.

In other words, “On the one hand this, on the other hand that, and how are we to choose between these two enemies?” But go read that Gawker article, and notice that Adrian Chen makes no mention of the two Open Left articles (Aug. 29 and Aug. 31, 2010) in which Neal Rauhauser outlined his plan for a game that wasn’t really a game, but was in fact a scheme intended to ensnare his enemies in civil litigation and criminal prosecution. Rauhauser did this while a partner in a Democrat consulting firm, and if the equation is not as simple as 2+2 = 4, you don’t need a Ph.D. in mathematics to add it up.

Rauhauser blamed all of this on his Tea Party enemies like Greg Howard and, as I said at the time, “It’s like blaming the Beach Boys and Doris Day for Charles Manson.” (A joke you won’t get if you don’t know how Manson’s pursuit of a music career involved Day’s son, producer Terry Melcher, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson.) Rauhauser evaded responsibility by displacing blame onto his Tea Party enemies, the “beandogs” said it was all a “harmless prank” and Adrian Chen evidently never suspected this alibi was anything but the whole truth.

Neal Rauhauser knew exactly what he was doing, he just didn’t plan on getting caught at it. First he claimed victimhood, and then he convinced Adrien Chen it had all been a joke that those crazy Tea Party “kooks” turned into a conspiracy theory when, in fact, there was actually a conspiracy and Neal was its architect.

The fact that Neal’s plan failed (because it got exposed) or that the “beandogs” may not have known the full extent of Rauhauser’s plan, in no way exonerates him for what he was attempting to do: Create a Tea Party scandal with headlines about “a very visible example” (perhaps Greg Howard) getting arrested and/or sued, so that there would then be “legitimate news” about what dangerous extremists these Tea Party people were, perhaps just weeks or days before the 2010 mid-term elections that were then approaching.

“You think that would fool a Corleone? . . . Today I settled
all family business, so don’t tell me that you’re innocent.
Admit what you did. … Don’t tell me that
you’re innocent, because it insults my intelligence
and it makes me very angry.”

Neal Rauhauser insulted the intelligence of everyone who closely examined what he did in 2010. Instead of taking that short “ride to the airport” that Michael Corleone arranged for Carlo Rizzi, however, Rauhauser drifted back into the Internet shadows, plotting to redeem his damaged reputation by successfully doing to someone — anyone — what he had so spectacularly failed to do to Greg Howard.

As I say, I’ve told this story before — please go read “‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection,” or re-read it, if you’ve forgotten how Rauhauser’s interests brought him into Brett Kimberlin’s orbit in mid-2011. The sequence of events involving Seth Allen and Aaron Walker happened while I was up to my eyeballs in covering the fight for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, so I had no idea that Rauhauser had joined forces with Kimberlin, a man I’d never heard of at the time.

You can therefore well imagine my reaction Wednesday, when I found Neal’s buddy Matt Osborne claiming that Aaron Walker was pursuing a “vendetta,” and that Lee Stranahan and myself lacked “journalistic integrity” because . . . well, because Matt Osborne is the Official Arbiter of Journalistic Integrity, you see. And I’ve now expended 5,000 words to explain exactly how this story began, just to demonstrate the actual sequence of events that Osborne don’t want anyone to examine too closely. Contrary to what Matt Osborne would have you think, this is not a story about me or Aaron Walker or Lee Stranahan. This is a story about Brett Kimberlin.

“You think that would fool a Corleone?”

Fuck you, Matt Osborne.

You don’t fool me. You don’t even fool Seth Allen.

 

Category: The Kimberlin Files
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