Good analysis of Johnson’s latest flounce out of the right’s door in a fit of pique on Right Wing News.
Read it all, it’s great. However.
Mr. Hawkins:
I think you’re correct on the continuing process, but not correct on the actual “big bang” of why he decided to start deeming people “fascists” in the first place (and all that came after).
One thing is the entire PJMedia experiment. Protein Wisdom also had some mighty angst about this: Roger Simon (and others in the group) revealed a hurtful fact to Johnson and others on the trough: PJM had been playing members for displaying ads over and above what they brought in. After 2 years, the seed money was gone, the investors wanted out and no more were to be had, so the blog welfare was shut off. Johnson and others felt betrayed and misused (don’t ask me why, there was some bitching that Simon had “misled” them by not telling them they were deadbeats a long time before. Frankly, I think he was pretty DAMN fair with them.
Be that as it may, it started a feud between a prominent right-blogger and some of the biggies in the business: Instapundit, Roger Simon, all of PJM vs. Johnson.
How does he respond? By ridiculing any points the right daily makes: listen, we all know how blogs work. A lot of what we do is “gotcha” to the other side. We’ve seen people at Redstate and Breitbart get on their high horses and say “let’s not be like the left, let’s not be petty”- well, I firmly believe Bush’s numbers cratered largely because of the daily cheap attacks on all sides, so I say fuck that, and attack Obama with everything we’ve got.
So, Johnson gets on his high horse and ridicules the same game he used to play, playing “gotcha” with the left on petty things. Not only that, he starts being reflexively, and offensively, against anything and everything the other rightblogs, whom he now despises more and more as he moves on to other subjects, as you say, turn against him.
It was a slam dunk he’d be a contrarian on Climategate, just like the tea-parties and health care “reform” and the stimulus, because the right was against or for any of these things, he must do and say the opposite. Such was his bitterness, exacerbated by, as you say, his accelerating descent into alienating everyone who every liked him.
Finally, I think Johnson thinks of himself as a pretty hip fellow. “Hip” people are open-minded and classically liberal, at least in their own minds. They are fine with gay marriage and haven’t a bigoted bone in their body (in their, hip minds), they are just too cool for that.
So when every media mention of LGF labels it “Anti-Islamic hate-site, LGF”, that had to grate on Johnson. Now he had to prove he was anti-jihad, but go bat-shit crazy over the top to prove he was not an anti-Arab bigot (he even expunged some old posts where he used unfortunate epithets like ragheads and the like).
So, he had to attack other rightblogs, knowing the left and the media LOVE a righty on righty feud and he’d get props for calling out the racist righties: hell, the leftists think we’re ALL racists, right, so Johnson had to be correct on this!
Bottom line though, unlike Balloonjuice, which also went from hard right to hard left, Johnson was too big a figure on the right for the left to ever embrace him (see Rathergate, which might have handed the election to Bush).
And 99% of the right hates him. Even small potatoes like AJStrata and Zombie, some of his last defenders, made an unwise comment or two and were ejected. There’s barely anyone left, except about a dozen hard-core sycophants on the LGF comments board.
But here’s the rub, and the truly psychotic thing about this: there’s a “Bandemonium” thread on a funny little blog, where banned LGFers gather to laugh at CJ and bemoan how the community has splintered there. But there are more than a few previously obsessive posters who claim that hard-core CJ suck-ups are none other than alters (sockpuppets) for CJ himself: he has accidentally posted obviously as the site owner, forgetting to log off the sockpuppet accounts, then quickly deleting the comment, but not before these constant reloaders saw it. You troll your own comments threads 24/7 like he does, posting repeatedly as many different people, it’s bound to happen. And it has, many, many times.
The madness of King Charles might be deeper than you think. He crowed about getting 6k pagehits yesterday like it was an Instalanche. Our site is FAR from a top-shelf righty blog, and we get 2k-2.5k pagehits on a normal day. And we don’t allow comments: he has an active comment community who must reload dozens of times EACH many times a day. What must his pagehits be on a non-“LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME EVERYONE! LOOK AT ME!” day? They must be sad, indeed, and the hits he gets are empty ones, from people reloading to see their own comments kissing Johnson’s ass (because those are the only ones he allows).
I think the only time anyone goes there at all is to see what madness he’s descended to now.
Look for him to self-destruct early next year, I’m guessing. He’ll completely lose it, and in a fit of pique, flounce off and close the site. Why keep it open if both sides detest you and everyone holds you in slight regard?
and these people have more:
Dennis the Peasant hits to hurt: I hope to fucking GOD Johnson reads this, it will make him whimper. And since reading everything said about Charles Johnson consumes Charles Johnson, he will. He’s probably curled up in a ball now, whimpering. A short highlight (but read it all, you will cackle evilly, believe me)
Charles is a failure. Let’s face it, the asshole is hawking calenders on Little Green Footballs. That’s pathetic. The fact that he has enough time to post several times a day, conduct regular and quite extensive purges of LGF’s ranks, ride his bicycle all over L.A. and waste time taking really awful photographs of inanimate objects tells me business isn’t all that good in the doing-web-page-design-for-money department. That should not be a surprise; he’s a failed musician and a failed internet media maven. It’s that sort of life that leads you to place way too much importance on your own place in the political blogosphere.
Ace o’ Spades more in sorrow than anger
Jawa Report eviscerates
Jules Crittenden hilarious take-down!
A.J. Strata sounds a note of Chuck-bayah (my Lord). Explains that Johnson is a victim … driven mad by people on the right, leapfrogged the center for the looney left. I guess that explains why everyone else is suddenly a pack of Belgian neo-nazis siegheiling Pat Buchanan. Strata says he was thoughtful and rational before he went off the deep end. I dunno … I always picked up arrogant, unpleasant and full of himself — even by blogospheric standards – and that’s just with people he had marginal differences with. Anyway, if you can’t hang, the kitchen door’s over there. I can’t wait to see what happens when he PO’s his new pals.
Dan Riehl is just weary of Chucky
James Joyner well modulated gutting by an otherwise reasonable, peaceful blogger
Da Tech Guy and more: he used to be a CJfanboi, now he’s not a CJfanboi, because CJ eventually discards even his defenders (see Zombie and AJStrata) so DTG, while an ok guy, is pretty much of a putz, being a contrarian defender of Johnson, who now rags on him once CJ kicks him to the curb. We could have told you that would happen.
UPDATE: DTG is cool enough to link to us, although he missed the real nub of our gist, instead focusing on a minor brilliant point, but still, he’s redeemed himself from putzhood. We’re just saying, anyone who cuts Johnson any slack at all is deluded (which DTG does again with some kind of “try to understand what it’s like being Charles Johnson schtick).
Ann Althouse (the queen of nice-blogging gets in a particularly nasty and apt dig on Johnson!)
This Ain’t Hell and this ain’t bad – plus, we being pr0nlovers immediately got the belladona-o ring reference. Too bad no one got our Dennis Moore reference over at The Hotline
Political Byline types words about it
Just One Minute a mere mention
Conservative Shemale has a little to say plus he/she quotes us, so he/she is our bottom bitch now (on Butter’s Bottom Bitch, the guys from Southpark claim “bottom bitch” is your top bitch
Cynthia Yockney piles on
Stop the ACLU mentions small Johnson
One Fine Jay rambles on about the subject, not sure where he’s going or where he’s been, but it’s short
Camp of the Saints beclowns itself by picking the wrong best title for the brouhaha (ours is the best, bitch)
Flapsblog posts some links, but without our witty rejoinders which accompany our links, his are nothing
DPGI quotes someone else’s shit and not much more
Sheik Yermama rules because of the Zappa reference. Charles Johnson Goes Down would have been apt as well.
Cold Fury deals the disdain
Pirate’s Cove crossposts STACLU
Pursuing Holiness explains what it means
American Neocon points out Johnson’s foibles
Lil’ Miss Attila and then she quotessomething mildly apt but barely humorous Dan Collins twitted
Around the Sphere works the copy/paste shortcuts, lovingly ensconced in blockquote
American Digest brings the derision on a subject we’ve covered, but not so bitingly
Another Black Conservative takes umbrage
“Moderate” voice takes no stand, which it never does unless it can slant a story to the left. Joe Gandelman is only “moderate” in that unlike a lot of loud-mouthed lefties, he’s a mealy mouthed pussy who never really states anything forcefully, he just kind of hints and stammers and weakly insinuates it, but it’s always a leftist talking point. Fuck you and your “moderate” pose, great way to get quoted by MSM types who actually quote blogs and love an “unbiased” angle. You suck dicks, gandelman, fuck you, doucher. He doesn’t even address nor quote the bullshit johnson spouts, he just accepts it at face value and nods understandingly at the poor moderate caught in the middle, just like gandelman, right? Fuck gandelman repeatedly, up the ass, just like he likes it, til his o-ring looks like belladonnas (see above). Fucking asshole pisses me off, at least kos and atrios are upfront about it. They are assholes, gandelman is a douchebag.
and mostly, Robert Stacy McCain makes Charles Johnson cry at night like a 6 month old baby girl