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!