Best. Blog. Headline. Evah!

"It took two years, and now the useless and damaging blogwar is finally over. . . . At this point virtually everyone in the blogosphere, except CAIR tool Charles Johnson's new Leftist and jihadist allies, knows what I have been pointing out ever since he began attacking me: that Charles Johnson is a smear merchant who traffics in half-truths, distortions, and outright lies, and whose testimony on any particular point is not to be trusted."
-- Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org,
"Stacy McCain is a genius!"

UPDATE: While I'm always eager to hear praise -- who isn't? -- there is a very serious issue involved. Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller and others were subjected to these LGF smears for nearly two years, going back to Geller's report on the October 2007 "counter-jihad" conference in Brussels. Too many people were silent, and I was silent too long.

As Pamela told me in a recent phone conversation, LGF's attacks had the effect of disrupting attempts to forge a trans-Atlantic alliance to deal with a genuine problem. "Counter-jihad" activists in both Europe and America lost support because one of the biggest "conservative" blogs was repeating discredited accusations of "fascism" against Vlaams Belang and Sweden Democrats.

Too many bloggers seemed to think, "Well, there must be something to it, or else Charles wouldn't be posting this stuff." But to my knowledge, Charles has never traveled to Sweden or Belgium to investigate any of the supposed "Eurofascists" he's denounced.

Furthermore, by passing along second-hand accusations against these Europeans he's never met, Mad King Charles has hurt people far away from Sweden and Belgium. Israel Matzav blogger Carl in Jersulem commented this afternoon in the Green Room:

This is the first time I’ve written about this (I’ve barely discussed it on my own blog), and while I promised Charles (and myself) that I wouldn’t disparage him when he banned me, I have to get a few things off my chest.
I don’t know if Charles has found out yet that he can’t get away with anything. His traffic is still way beyond what most of us get (at least if you believe his own stats - he doesn’t use one of the services), so someone is still reading his blog. Maybe it’s Sharmuta clicking the page open all the time, but it’s still an awful lot of hits. And if you read nothing but LGF, the only indication that something’s wrong (aside from the constant bannings) is that when he opens registration, no one signs up anymore.
To people in Israel, Charles Johnson is a big pro-Israel blogger. Most of the people here think of him as the guy who exposed the photoshop in Lebanon during the war. They don’t understand that he’s banned many of the most pro-Israel people on his blog - some of us because we disagreed with him on intelligent design (or avoided posting on his blog because it degenerated into more and more threads about those kinds of topics where if we expressed our views, we’d be gone), and others because he deemed us Kahanists because we expressed views that have become quite mainstream here, but which were once the bailiwick of Meir Kahane. At the Jewish bloggers conference last week, the non-bloggers were shocked that I’ve been banned. And then there’s the personal side of it. A lot of us who had been there for years (I started posting on LGF in 2002 or 2003 - before there was registration) thought of Charles as our friend. Kind of like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Pam Geller once referred to him as her ‘blog daddy’ and I think that’s the way a lot of us thought of him. When you wake up one morning and discover that your ‘blog daddy’ has publicly attacked you, it gets personal. And that’s why you’re seeing so many attacks on Charles from real conservative bloggers today - because he has betrayed us. But for the people who just read LGF and don’t post and don’t blog themselves - they have no idea what all the fuss is about.

Exactly. This is why I wrote an entire post to explain, "Why it's not a blog war." At some point, the authority of LGF was abused to harm the innocent, and it became the duty of decent people to speak truth to the power of Mad King Charles. Instead, his arrogance inflated by the silence of those who feared him, Charles continued his mad vendettas until finally he provoked the Gaelic war cry.

Thanks and praise are welcome, but not necessary, for one who has only done what duty required -- and that duty was not done as promptly as it should have been, a delay for which I must apologize. But as I always say, if you feel the urge to hit the tip jar, don't fight the feeling.