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

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

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