Posts Tagged ‘charles johnson’

…guess which one?

The Memeorandum thread is here.

I’ll give you a hint: Rush Limbaugh is an honorary member of his site and he publishes Color of Change press releases as fact.

Update: BOOM! Thunderstorm killed net for a moment in mid save.

…is Chronicled is some detail at Gates of Vienna (via lgf2) in a post sarcastically called Becoming the MSM:

Sometimes even prominent bloggers make mistakes. But Rule #1 of blogging is to correct all errors promptly and post retractions. A blogger’s credibility supposedly hinges on such prompt corrections.

To this day, Charles Johnson has not corrected or retracted these two factual errors, nor any of the others.

And, strangely enough, his credibility hardly suffered at all. His star didn’t begin its descent until he picked fights with some of the big guns in the American blogosphere. Now — two years later — he is finally recognized as a retailer of smears and falsehoods.

Funny about that.

It’s not funny at all but the explanation as to why it took so long for him to be figured out is explained in the next sentence.

Charles Johnson made his substantial reputation back in October 2004 as one of the major bloggers who helped discredit CBS, Dan Rather, and the forged “Killian Memo”.

Basically most people here in the states weren’t familiar with what was going on over there. We saw Charles become a 9/11 hawk, saw what he did with both Rather and the Fauxphotography and with those precedents decided that he knew what he was doing. We assumed this was a blog war and figured it was both a bit of a blog war and and to some degree an honest disagreement along the lines of “who do we want as allies”?

I wrote a defense of Charles back in April at the start of his big break with US bloggers and had this to say about some of the people he was talking about:

BTW: I didn’t include the “other side” on the various disputes because this particular post was concerning Charles and LGF. I’ve read and been happy to quote both Atlas and Jihad Watch on various topics and will continue to do so. I would recommend checking out both sites and Charles’ archives if you want the full back and forth between them. I don’t listen to, read or watch Beck so frankly I’m not really interested.

On the Vlaams Belang

(BTW I don’t have a problem with either Geller’s or Johnson’s positions as they are both in my opinion decisions of conscience)

I linked to Pam and I’ve linked to Gates, didn’t have a problem with either as I simply assumed it was a stronger version of the old CIA debate over how pure allies in the war on terror have to be.

Since I had read Charles regularly until other blogs overtook him in my attentions I missed a lot of the banning. It wasn’t until he went after Robert Stacy that I actually saw Or cared what was going on.

So I must confess that I’ve been more concerned with my own situation so here is the link to the Gates Correcting page for LGF. I suggest you read it along with Charles Charges from his archives (while they are still there anyway). It will not surprise you now but it might have before. Gates of Vienna is dead on with this:

He has become the Dan Rather of the blogosphere.

Back in those heady days when political blogs first came into their own, the bloggers promised the MSM that they would “fact-check their a**.”

But what about the major blogs? Who will fact-check their a**es?

The answer, in a word, is: nobody.

I am a very minor blog in the scheme of things but for what it’s worth I’m sorry I didn’t give your situation the attention it deserved.

One of the things that fascinated me during the Iraq war was the amount of bad information and press that was coming from the MSM.

Basically the media relied on stringers (of dubious source and allegiance) to get general information that could be spun any way that the media desired.

Reading these threads concerning the Sparkman murder it was like those days of yesteryear when the media still thought the war could be lost.

While the SPLC sees little evidence of hate groups targeting the Census Bureau, there isn’t much sympathy for Sparkman on those groups’ Web sites.

Got that even though the Charles’s favorite “civil rights” group says there there is little evidence of the census being targeted Newsweek manages to paint the picture they want to paint.

God forbid they actually deal with someone who was actually there as the Sundries Shack points out:

What is the difference between those two journalists? One of them actually went to Kentucky for three days, spoke to people in Clay and Laurel Counties and filed no fewer than four stories while there.

Guess which one of the two wasn’t in Kentucky? If you said the highly-paid so-called journalist for Newsweek, you win a cookie!

And despite the late Mr. Johnson (when I say the late Mr. Johnson I’m referring to his credibility) says he was not trying to pick up girls he was instead, wait for it…Reporting:

Baseless speculation about this case — and particularly, the attempt by some to make a political symbol of Sparkman’s death — was what motivated me to travel this past week to Kentucky, where I spent three days in Clay County and neighboring Laurel County, where Sparkman lived.

The involvement of the FBI in the case has resulted in an almost complete official silence from state and local law enforcement. However, residents of the area (including local journalists I interviewed at length) are profoundly skeptical of any suggestion that Sparkman was killed because of general “anti-government sentiment” (as the Associated Press was first to suggest) or the more specific “anti-Census sentiment” that is the subject of this Newsweek story.

He elaborates further on his blog which is nice of him since unlike his spectator article it doesn’t guarantee a paycheck for what he says:

It’s a free country, which means everyone is free to speculate how and why Bill Sparkman died. But ill-informed speculation and assumptions are no substitute for facts, and there are still too many unknown facts for anyone to pretend to know the motives of whoever put Sparkman’s body in that cemetery.

If the editors of Newsweek don’t want to pay for solid, sensible, accurate reporting, they need to grab themselves a fresh, hot cup of delicious STFU.

Ah Robert Stacy you forget, Newsweek is not in the business of printing facts, they are in the business of selling magazines to a rapidly diminishing segment of the population that has a particular set of prejudices. If they are not given what they want or expect will the magazine sell? Will their people be interviewed on the talk show circuit? Will they be invited to all the right parties?

It is that same sycophancy that drives Newsweek in this case and Hollywood in the Polanski case. The desire to fit in with the chosen group or the determination that their gravy train is best served by being acceptable to said group.

As for Charles, well I remember the old days when the left figured he was paid, some bloggers have suggested it and it would explain much but I don’t buy it. Why see a conspiracy that there is no evidence for when there is ample evidence of an angry jealous snit?

And have you noticed he always waits till Robert Stacy is out of town or unavailable to launch his attacks?

What a Maroon!

Oh and I didn’t see the Rachel Maddow stuff but anyone who takes her anything resembling seriously is not someone who should be taken seriously either. As Cynthia Yockey says

If Maddow wants to work guilt-by-association on anyone, why didn’t she start with Moammar Gaddafi’s testimonial for Obama when he was running for president, complete with the assertion that he believes Obama is a Muslim? Or Louis Farrakhan’s testimonial for Obama? The last I looked they were on YouTube, fer cryin’ out loud. And isn’t Gaddafi a Muslim supremacist — commanded by Allah to kill all unbelievers? And isn’t Farrakhan a Muslim black supremacist, commanded by Allah to … say really mean things about white people and unbelievers? Why is there no guilt-by-association for Obama with ANY of the murderers, crooks, Commies, kooks, anti-Semites and tax-evaders that comprise the rogues’ gallery of his life-long bosom friends and fellow travelers? Why is there no guilt-by-association for Obama due to his intimate ties to Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn — who missed killing ME by 10 minutes in 1970, Valerie Jarrett, Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Franklin Marshall Davis, just to name a few?

What a joke.

I just listened to the clip, you know when you don’t want to book real conservatives it really limits the number of different people you can have on. I can’t wait till 2010 & 2012. Proving those jokers wrong will be a great pleasure.

Considering the number of people Charles has been hitting lately I was wondering why Glenn hasn’t taken note of all the back and forth in the ‘sphere over the McCain/Johnson et/all stuff. I figured once Tim Blair was involved as well that might produce one post and I really hoped that my Julius Caesar post Friends, bloggers, Conservatives might have gotten his notice. (Feel free to recommend it to him)

But it didn’t hit me until I was thinking about the anti-palin stuff in the Amazon discussions. The Luna(tic) woman wasn’t just taking the time to hit Palin, he included her blog link and wanted to piggyback her comments on Palin into hits in the same way that MSNBC uses Rush.

Charles now has the Palin/racist post with a photo of Palin at the top of his blog, it is there to generate interest and hits. My own mild involvement in the controversy with Robert Stacy gave me a month even better than my instalance month.

Any comment he makes will drive traffic to Mr. Johnson thus he keeps his own counsel.

Years ago Glenn published a letter I wrote him on the subject of Haditha and it led to me suddenly becoming an “internet nazi” to the left. I had it for one day but he must get it every single day since he took his first stand onlie. I asked him how he puts up with it and his answer to me that day is still valid:

Practice. Plus, like Jeff Goldstein, I crap bigger than them. Much bigger. . . .

So Glenn will likely remain silent even if Charles tries to goad him. Like Robert Stacy, just because we don’t know what he is doing doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.