Resolved: Barrett Brown is a putz

Having noticed an earlier mention, the spokesman for The Godless Coalition e-mails to deny being an Avatar fan and added an "offer" to debate, to which I replied:

"Offer"? As if you were the soul of generosity, and I in need of your philanthropy. Do your work, do it well, collect your pay and knock it off with the humanitarian posturing. You've never done an unselfish act in your life, and by pretending otherwise, you undermine your own credibility. Better to be honestly selfish than to be falsely charitable.

As to the title of this post: William F. Buckley was once invited to debate British feminist Germaine Greer at the Oxford Union, but after an exhausting series of trans-Atlantic communications, they were unable to agree on the proposition to be debated. Finally, his patience exhausted by the annoyance, Buckley cabled back this offer: "Resolved: Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile."

Barrett Brown and I have nothing to "debate." In October, while I was working on the Sparkman story in Kentucky, he jumped on the LGF bandwagon. He has since promised to include an entire chapter about me in his forthcoming book. This would be a bizarre non sequitur in a volume evidently otherwise devoted to assailing various prominent pro-Israel pundits -- Charles Krauthammer, Marty Peretz, etc. -- which is why I suggested his publisher rename the book, People That Barrett Brown Doesn't Like (Mainly Jews).

My friends are my friends and my job is my job. Which explains why, however harmful the effort of Charles Johnson and others to hang labels on me, there is no flinch reflex on my part. Because I don't flinch at their accusations, as they are accustomed to seeing people do in such circumstances, they become enraged and vengeful, misrepresenting my response (or non-response, whichever the case may be) as some sort of admission.

What this game comes down to, as any disinterested observer discerns, is a question of authority, their status as accuser. Whatever harm they do to me is mere collateral damage in their campaign of ambitious vanity, as they seek to enhance their own reputations at my expense. (Did I mention "vanity"? Yeah: Barrett's obviously got a Google-alert on his name, so he'll read this, too.)

As long as there is work I can do, I'll do it, even if I have to go back to driving a forklift (which was what I was doing before I landed my first newspaper job). Readers who wish to see me continue blogging should hit the tip jar.

How Not to Review a Movie

Sunday, it was established by consensus -- because no sane man would argue with Debbie Schlussel -- that Avatar sucks. The science is settled. And yet liberals aren't content to leave it at that:

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). . . .

Why bother deconstructing the racial subtext of a crappy 3-D sci-fi movie? It's like pondering the cultural significance of Scooby-Doo, or doing your Ph.D. dissertation on feminist themes as embodied by Veronica and Betty in "Archie" comics.

Don't you people have lives? Speaking of which, I'm told that Barrett Brown loved Avatar. Not that he's a racist. But he does suck. Be sure to look for his book, People That Barrett Brown Doesn't Like (Mainly Jews), coming soon to a clearance bin near you.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Demonization, Inc.

My boast as a greedy capitalist is that "I Write For Money." It's rather odd that some people evidently get paid to write about me, in publications that wouldn't pay me a dime to write about myself.

If I'm such a damned fascinating subject, offer me 40 cents a word and I'll cheerfully deliver 1,000 words within 24 hours. (Leaving me plenty of time to goof off. Tuesday's 900-word column for The American Spectator was written in less than four hours.)

Nevertheless, publishers eschew this eliminate-the-middle-man efficiency, which brings us back to the subject of Barrett Brown, spokesman for the Godless Coalition. Yesterday I noted that Brown was promising to add a chapter about me to his forthcoming book, which I jokingly suggested he rename People That Barrett Brown Doesn't Like (Mainly Jews).

Today I received a courteous e-mail from Brown explaining that the context of his proposed chapter on me "involves the article you composed in 2002 regarding Jonathan Farley, as well as the activities in which you were otherwise engaged at the time in which you wrote that particular piece." To which I replied:

Thank you for the courtesy, sir. My first response was, "Jonathan Farley? Who is Jonathan Farley?" Then I looked it up and recognized him as the Vanderbilt University professor with the Che Guevara poster who waged a campaign to rename Confederate Memorial Hall, a controversy I reported about.
Shall I surmise the "otherwise engaged" as indicative of your belief that my reporting was not entirely objective? If I succeed in my fundraising drive to go to Pasadena to cover the BCS championship, do you suppose that I'll get the score wrong or misspell the players' names?
You are yourself an ax-grinder with a cause, Mr. Barrett. If your publisher wishes to provide you with the opportunity to advance that cause at my expense, that would be an interesting transaction, although I doubt it will prove very lucrative for either of you.
-- RSM

Honest commerce ought not be the grounds for personal animosity, and I try to be empathetic toward those who are paid to demonize me.

The SPLC's Heidi Beirich has practically made a career of writing about what a terrible person I am, yet I've promised her that we'll get together and sing karaoke next time I visit Montgomery to see my kin. Dr. Beirich has my sympathy because, evidently unable to obtain any respectable employment, she is compelled by misfortune to work for that treacherous bastard Morris Dees.

Here's the thing: Dees runs a tax-exempt non-profit, which was started with a mailing list of 1972 McGovern campaign contributors. He has amassed a $150 million endowment by convincing elderly liberals that, unless they send a check to the SPLC today, the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street tomorrow. It's a dishonest racket, and Dees gets away with such a scam only because his victims donors are convinced that by sending him money, they're engaging in an act of humanitarian charity.

If Brown and his publisher think they're going to make a profit by horning in on the SPLC's fearmongering racket, let them ask Max Blumenthal's publisher how much profit they've made from his book Republican Gomorrah. I just noticed a review of Blumenthal's book by . . . wait for it . . . Frank Schaeffer:

Blumenthal first came to my attention when he was doing his in-depth reporting on Sarah Palin. He was a guest on a TV program I was on too. There was something accomplished and in depth about the quality of his reporting on religion that I hadn't seen from other progressive sources. I've been following his work since. . . .
No one else has ever investigated this subject with as much insight into the psychological sickness that is the basis of the Religious right's power to delude other people who are also needy and unstable.
In another time and place the despicable (and sometimes tragic figures) Blumenthal describes would be the leaders of, or the participants in, local lynch mobs, or the followers of the Ku Klux Klan. But today figures such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, (the late) Jerry Falwell, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin have led a resentment-driven second American revolution, not just against Democrats and progressives but against the United States of America itself. . . .

The market for this kind of Theocratic Hate Menace stuff is already glutted, yet it seems that publishers can't get enough of it. People are standing in line to buy Sarah Palin's bestseller, while the effort to cash in on anti-Palin sentiment yields . . . what? MSNBC?

Barrett Brown's book briefly summarized: Stuff people have written or said on TV that pisses me off.

Good luck with selling that. It's still a free country and people have the right to waste their money however they see fit. Hitting my tip jar to send me to Pasadena wouldn't be a total waste -- I guarantee the reporting will be more interesting than anything Max Blumenthal has ever written -- but still I've got those Empty Tip-Jar Blues.

Barrett Brown gets a book deal!

Reacting to a previous thread, the communication director of the Godless Coalition left a comment (now deleted) that included this:

I have decided to include a chapter on you in my upcoming book, which will be released in April and which deals with the structural deficits of the American information flow. You will be in good company.

Ah. A late addition to his forthcoming paperback, Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America's Chattering Class, which is described online thus:

A pundit is as a king. America replaces its presidents, its senators, and its generals, but a pundit made is a pundit forever. From this, we may determine either that every American pundit is so deserving of his position in the punditocracy that he ought to hold it forever, or that some pundits are in fact not qualified for their roles but nonetheless remain in place by way of inertia. This state of affairs is either very good or very bad for the public's understanding of crucial issues. Hot, Fat, and Clouded assumes the latter, and from this position serves as the most damning attack yet written on the failures of the opinion class. Ignoring the nation's more obviously ridiculous media figures, the book concentrates instead on America's "serious" commentators: The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, The Washington Post columnists Richard Cohen and Charles Krauthammer, and The New Republic editor Martin Peretz among others.

Hmmm. Friedman, Cohen, Krauthammer, Peretz and . . . me? A very interesting selection of subjects.

Also, a very curious arrangement Brown has with his publishers. Less than three months before the advertised March 1 publication date, Brown is permitted to insert into his manuscript a chapter on me.

Friedman is a columnist for the New York Times, Cohen and Krauthammer are columnists for the Washington Post, and Peretz is the longtime editor-in-chief of the New Republic. All might rightly be described as well-known "pundits" of the "chattering class," whereas I . . . well, this is very curious, to say the least.

Barrett's publisher should retitle the book, People That Barrett Brown Doesn't Like (Mainly Jews).

Reply to Barrett Brown

The communication director of the Godless Coaltion sent an e-mail last night, taunting me about the allegatiions made against me by himself, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and others. I replied:

A rare occasion, Mr. Brown, when any of those who've chosen to attack me even bother attempting to contact me. Of course, no one ever contacts me in advance: "Hey, did you actually write X, Y, Z? If so, why? What did you mean? What are your opinions about these things?" Instead, they leap to assumptions (if it's on the Internet, it must be true) and the fact that certain things have been endlessly repeated online leads to the assumption that these things are true.
How often, since Charles Johnson began attacking me, have I emphasized that, during the years I was at the Washington Times, I was not permitted to address these allegations? And how often have I remarked that "white supremacy" is quite contrary to my observed conduct among those who actually know me?
You are, I gather, a young man, and quite arrogant. Not an unusual combination, really, but neither should you mistake your own arrogance for knowledge. Try Googling my name in combination with the phrase "Hayekian insight." There are in the near-infinite number of things you don't know certain facts that may, I suspect, be far more important than those tacts you know. And it may be that you are mistaken about some things you accept as facts.
Well, I've had more time to study all this sort of thing than you could imagine. You desire to make me look like a villain, for whatever selfish motive, and therefore assemble a prosecutor's case -- the Ransom Note Method. This you present with a lot of noise and clamour: "A-ha! I have exposed the dangerous villain, whose stealthy evil had never been fully known until now!"
Now, what is *expected* of me in response is that I will address your "evidence" point-by-point or, failing that, that I will Deny, Denounce and Repudiate: "Oh, I'm not actually friends with Person A, and I abhor the thought of being associated with Person B."
Ah, but there is never an end to it, you see? Were I to answer charges A, B, C, you would then proceed to interrogate me about D, E, F, etc. To address your accusations in such a manner would ultimately avail me nothing, while tacitly acknowledging your authority to act the part of the interrogator. Further, such a response would ssuggest that there is some legitimate cause to suspect my good faith, to cause others to believe that perhaps I harbor a hidden hatred which must be rooted out and renounced. You invite me to a Maoist re-education camp, with yourself playing the role of commissar. The cloud of suspicion is thrown upoin me, and I must prove myself innocent!
Except that I don't. We live in a free society and I am not even a candidate for public office. I am not paid for having the correct opinion about anything. Opinions might be profitable to Bill Kristol or George Will, but I am not one of those big-shot pundits. It is my skill and hard work, and not my opinions, which are my stock in trade.
What you and Johnson and others apparently wish to do is to cast upon me a stigma, which you may then use as part of a campaign of guilt-by-association smear against various of my friends. You seem to assume that my friends are fools and cowards, and will automatically disassociate themselves from me, lest you then say, "A-ha! So-and-so associates with Robert Stacy McCain, who is a hateful racist!"
Except that I'm not a hateful racist. And this, sir, is the big point that you seem to have missed entirely. People know me, and the people who know me know that I have no hate in my heart, and if they felt it necessary to speak up on my behalf, you might be surprised at who would sing my praises. Their silence you mistake for fear, is rather an expression of their contempt for your malicious behavior.
Whatever you say about me, I am certain you will fail to convict me of hate, Barrett. I don't even hate you.

Best regards,
--Robert Stacy McCain
Co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of DONKEY CONS: Sex, Crime & Corruption in the Democratic Party

Strange to say, writing that e-mail cheered me up. I had been feeling kind of down in the dumps, but there is nothing like teaching a seminar to cheer me up. Pay attention, class. This might be on your final exam.

How is Charles Johnson like a gnat?

Now I understand why I've been getting phone calls and e-mails the past three days: "Hey, are you OK?" Or: "I just want you to know, I think Charles is crazy . . ."

Or, occasionally: "Sue the bastards!"

Godless twerp Barrett Brown (spokesman for the Lemming Herd of Faithless Fools) had posted something I noticed a couple of times in the SiteMeter, but I never clicked over to read it until the wee hours this morning. Why? Simple: I've been very busy, and the link wasn't throwing much traffic and, in case you haven't noticed, I'm all about the traffic.

I Write For Money and, in the blogging business, the formula is simple: Traffic = Money, or at least the potential for money. If you ain't got traffic, your potential for the blog-o-bucks is zilch. Converting traffic into cash ("monetizing" traffic, as they say) is the eternal arcane quest of online alchemists, but focus first on growing your traffic. Everything else follows from that.

With a wife, six kids and impatient creditors, having quit the newspaper business after more than two decades to go freelance and establish an independent career online, perhaps you can understand why I shrug at inconsequential fools like Barrett Brown, who cites Charles Johnson as his authoritative source for this:

A fellow editor at the Washington Times once characterized McCain as "an ill-tempered racist who sat on the other side of my desk for many years and carried on loud telephone conversations almost every day full of racist and ultra-right comments, and often got into loud verbal fights with both reporters and editors in the newsroom."

He can't even get his lies straight! First of all, the former colleague was not an editor, but a once-notable reporter, whose life went downhill after his wife left him. This person's character, and the motives for his attempted character assassination of me, are well-known to many reputable people who can testify as to the truth of the matter, which is contrary to the quoted description. (Recycling the three-year-old "investigative journalism" of Max Blumental? Pathetic.)

Given Brown's ineptitude as a journalist -- monomaniacal fanatics seldom make good reporters -- I would have been content to ignore him altogether. However, in the Great Godless Circle Jerk of Fools, Brown cited Mad King Charles who then praised Brown's "excellent piece" as a basis for calling me a "vile racist creep."

That was Thursday morning and I didn't even notice. The traffic impact was somewhere in a range between "negligible" and "insignificant," and since Wednesday -- with recreational time off to make fun of my idiot cousin Meghan -- I've been quite busy with the key NY23 congressional contest. (Friday night I filed 1,200 words.)

Somebody had posted a link to the LGF item at my Facebook page Thursday but I don't check my Facebook account very often, and it wasn't until after midnight Saturday -- after the undefeated Crimson Tide crushed South Carolina 20-6 -- that I saw the link.

The most ludicrous aspect of this particular reiteration of Charles Johnson's attack on me, with the assistance of Barrett Brown, is the ludicrous assertion that I am somehow emblematic of "The Fall of the Conservative Movement."

Riiiiiiight. Because we know how much CJ and BB care about the Conservative Movement.

A few days ago, amid the 500 or so comments on an Ace of Spades HQ post about the pathetic decline of Little Gestapo Fascists, someone linked to an Alexa analysis of LGF's traffic. To paraphrase the commenter's question: Is the Madness of King Charles -- his "Race Detective" attacks on Pamela Geller, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, etc. -- merely a bizarre sort of traffic-baiting?

Just out of curiosity, I entered my own URL into the Alexa calculus. Lo and behold, I was surprised to discover that in recent months, there have been days when traffic to my little blog has exceeded the once-mighty LGF.

If Johnson's site occasionally has been eclipsed by a Blogspot site operated by an obscure middle-aged ex-newspaperman who has only been blogging full-time since March 2008, and who has never exceeded 500,000 page-views in a month . . . Dude.

Babylon the Great is fallen! What an embarrassing failure he has become! And if you compare LGF to Michelle Malkin's Hot Air -- would you be surprised to learn that Charles spent his Saturday trying to prove that Hot Air readers are about "neo-Nazi white supremacist stuff, of the Christian Identity variety." (For posting items about Mexico?)

One might easily imagine how it curdled Charles Johnson's blood last month when he saw me providing my friend Stephen Green with exclusive reporting live from the 9/12 March on D.C. -- which was what I was doing when CJ first attacked me.

Envy is an ugly emotion, suited to small people.

All of this I write not to defend myself, but merely to assure my friends and family that everything is fine. Nothing to worry about. I got Instalanched last night and all is right with the world. Just the other day, I responded to a liberal blogger's recycling of secondhand smears:

Having long ago discovered that silence is often the best response to smears, it is nonetheless annoying to see people who have never met me claim to know my opinions on subjects about which they have never bothered to ask me themselves --although my e-mail address is public knowledge and my personal phone number is known to hundreds of journalists in Washington.
To quote the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts, and I am damned tired of people stating as a fact that my opinion is such-and-such, based on secondary sources of dubious veracity and questionable motives.

So, to my worried friends and kin: Don't sweat it. I'm OK. The people who know and trust me are more important than the insignificant fools who attack me. I'm trying to raise money for a reporting trip to upstate New York this week, if you want to contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund, but other than that, don't sweat this latest little annoyance.

It's like a gnat trying to rape an elephant. Whatever pleasure the gnat derives from the experience, if the elephant notices at all, it's only an itch.

UPDATE: How insanely self-obsessed is Mad King Charles? This was posted at 4:54 a.m. ET. Exactly four minutes later (9:58 a.m. GMT = 4:58 ET) Johnson grabbed a Google cache, before I even had time to correct the first-draft typos. (Note that, in the Google cache version, the last sentence of my original post concludes ". . . it only an itch"; I'd omitted the possessive.)

That was the version of the post linked at LGF for display to handful of remaining readers, as evidence of my alleged mean-spiritedness. Never mind Charles' malicious attempt to deprive me of freelance income as a reporter/columnist for Pajamas Media, you see: He is always the victim, and therefore any word I write in my own defense is proof that I am being cruel toward Obergruppenfuhrer Banningstick and his Beer Hall brownshirts.

Anyway, it's a sad testament to Johnson's pathological narcissism that clanging alarms go off at LGF HQ every time his name is mentioned anywhere on the Internet, and his minions scramble to grab the Google cache, like so many spaniels fetching downed quail for a birdhunter. Amazing that such a leader should have such loyal followers.

Little Green Footballs: Putting the M Back in S&M!

Godless Americans

The lemming herd of faithless fools:

Enlighten The Vote grew out of the historic "Godless Americans March on Washington" (GAMOW) held on November 2, 2002 in Washington, DC. On that memorable day, for the first time in history, the diverse community of Atheists, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and other non-religious Americans gathered in our nation’s capitol to demonstrate to the world that we are free, proud and on the move.

Thanks for this helpful information, sir. How many Philistines did Samson slay with less?