From Robert Stacy McCain himself.
Listen, I would have liked to comment on this:
http://www.theblogmocracy.com/2010/06/28/the-insane-ramblings-of-rev-manning/
Your comments are members-only, however, so I’m e-mailing you instead.
It ought to be obvious to you by now that Charles Johnson is deceiving his readers about his motives — posturing as The Great Crusader Against Conservative Racism — just as he is deceiving them about me. His idiocy about the SiteMeter login is merely Johnson’s latest imposition on the gullibility of LGF readers who share his delusion that everything knowable can be known via the Internet.
Here is the SiteMeter URL for the original Blogspot site:
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s29othermccain
As you can see, the login is simply “othermccain.” Smitty joined as co-blogger in March 2009, about a year after I began blogging full-time. It was Smitty (an IT specialist by trade) who convinced me, after much nagging, that we should switch the blog to a custom WordPress platform.
Because this move was Smitty’s idea and he was more familiar with the requirements thereof, I left the technical wizardry to him, including the installation of SiteMeter. We couldn’t migrate the SiteMeter from the old blog to the new site, so Smitty created a new account, setting the “start” number for total visits at the new site as the 12/30/09 total from the old site. (We launched full-time on the new site 1/1/10.)
Smitty chose “PorchManque” as the login for the new SiteMeter, employing a nickname for himself that he had used occasionally on the blog in referring to his sidekick role, compiling the FMRJA Saturday roundups and the Rule 5 Sunday posts, etc. It signifies nothing except perhaps as an example of Smitty’s love of Carrollesque wordplay, and I gave it no thought at all.
The fact that no one else gave it any thought until Charles Johnson jumped on it speaks volumes. Given the extreme scrutiny to which I’ve been subjected on the topic of raaaaacism, don’t you suppose someone else might have seized on this evidence before now? Johnson only noticed it because I mentioned on Twitter that one of his posts slamming me had delivered less traffic than random Google searches for Miley Cyrus. This prompted him to look at my SiteMeter, where his Javert-like obsession led him to an yet another idiotic “a-ha” blunder.
Charles Johnson counts on his readers being as foolish as he is, which is why he began purging anyone who questioned him after he began his jihad against Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, et al. Once a few clever readers began noticing that the Lizard King was an idiot, Johnson became gripped by the narcissist’s greatest fear: That others will discover his fundamental worthlessness.
Once Johnson had committed himself to the anti-Geller jihad, it was impossible for him to say, “Hey, you know, maybe I’m wrong about this Vlaams Belang stuff. Maybe the political situation in Belgium is more complex than I’ve made it out to be. And maybe, in the grand scheme of things, Belgian nationalism isn’t really a grave threat to world peace.”
This is the nub of it, you see: Johnson’s inability to discern between dangers real and imagined, his lack of a rational sense of proportion about various potential threats. Such a lack of discernment is characteristic of paranoia. It may well be the case that some founders of Vlaams Belang could fairly be labeled neo-fascist, and that some voters who supported VB were also ill-motivated. I don’t know, as I haven’t spend a lot of time examining the evidence for those claims. But Geller and Spencer (and other Americans) who have traveled to Belgium say that this Nazi smear on VB is unfair. More to the point, what is the likelihood of some sort of latter-day brownshirt operation taking power in Belgium? And how serious is that alleged threat, when compared to the Islamicization of Europe?
Here you see the common thread between Johnson’s anti-Geller jihad and his mad rantings about creationists and global-warming “denialists.” It doesn’t matter whether you agree with Johnson on these issues or not. Are these real dangers to the commonweal? No. Are bible-thumpers crashing airliners into skyscrapers? Are policy analysts from the Competitive Enteprise Institute going on murder rampages at Army bases? Of course not. But Johnson can’t tell the difference between his pet peeves and genuine dangers, and people who don’t share his pet peeves are suspected of being in league with the enemy.
I’ve studied Johnson’s modus operandi and, what’s more, I know the type: People who seek to impress others by a pretended expertise, and who become enraged when it is pointed out that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. Everybody knows the guy who, when among a group of football fans watching a game on TV, makes a point of lecturing about the zone defense, etc., presenting himself as an authority to whom others must defer. And if you question his authority, however mildly, he’ll get angry and start arguing vehemently as if disagreement were an insult. It’s about him, you see.
Thanks to Al Gore’s invention of the Internet, such people are no longer content to bore and annoy their friends, now they can bore and annoy the whole world, arguing endlessly about the most inconsequential things.
This characteristic disproportion between stimulus and response, was what first drew my attention to the LGF-Geller feud. It was the day after the 2008 election and Charles Johnson decided that the way to mark the occasion was to lash out at his idee fixe. I called him on it:
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2008/11/pam-geller-nazi.html
“Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has apparently decided that the problem with the conservative movement is that it needs more purges, and Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs seems to be his designated scapegoat. . . . Pam is a good person and I would suggest that this guilt-by-association ‘urge to purge’ is antithetical to the best interests of conservatism. You can’t build a movement by the process of subtraction.”
Given everything that conservatives had to worry about on Nov. 5, 2008, how did Geller’s association with Belgian nationalists rate such attention? And we might say the same thing about Johnson’s fascination with my alleged racism. Johnson evidently didn’t think this worth noticing until after he saw Stephen Green was getting my phoned-in reports from the 9/12 March on DC. I then devoted two entire weeks to defending myself, the main point of my argument being that Charles Johnson is an idiot.
Not everything knowable is on the Internet. What Johnson can’t seem to grasp is that he can pile up online “evidence” to his heart’s content without ever changing the opinions of people who actually know me. And because I’m outgoing and gregarious, there are many hundreds of such people.
This is where Johnson becomes infuriated, you see. He keeps attacking me, and demanding that others shun me, and when this doesn’t happen, he encourages his readers to leap to the wrong conclusion: “Ah! They’re all in on it together!” It apparently never occurs to the LGF readers that the reason I’m not being shunned is because people have worked with me and hung out with me and know me well enough to know that I’m not what Johnson says I am.
Notice how, in his attacks, Johnson keeps repeating the label “white supremacist blogger,” an accusation that can be disproven by anyone who cares to read my blog. I had been blogging full-time for 18 months when Johnson attacked me and never once blogged anything that caused anyone to accuse me of racism. Yet it is important for Johnson to keep repeating the label, so that none of his remaining readers will be led to begin reading The Other McCain, from which experience they might conclude that Charles is full of crap, that my blog is not a “white supremacist” site.
Why have I written at such lengths in response to that post? Because I noticed some commenters at the Blogmocracy were engaged in debating whether or not the writer had been inciting or defending racism by employing the term “porch monkey” in his discussion of Johnson’s “PorchManque” blunder. One of the commenters, being from North Texas, said he’d only ever heard the term “porch monkey” used as a racial epithet. Smitty is from the Pacific Northwest, and I doubt that connotation ever entered his mind.
More importantly, I ask you to consider the ultimate futility of Johnsonism, which I would define as raking through online “evidence” with the belief that you are “proving” something about the character of people you don’t know. The comments on that thread quickly turned into a game of “Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Racist” — j’accuse!
Don’t let that foolishness take hold at the Blogmocracy as it did at LGF. In the Age of Obama, anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat is automatically assumed to be racist by liberals, and conservatives are only abetting liberal nonsense when they seize on such thin pretexts to make these accusations against each other. If anyone in the conservative movement wishes to do something about racism, let him do so in a positive and effective way, by supporting candidates like Vernon Parker:
http://theothermccain.com/2010/04/07/vernon-parker-trained-by-the-best/
Let Vernon Parker go to Congress, and let Charles Johnson go to hell. As for me, well, to borrow a lyric from John Lennon, everybody’s got something to hide except me and my manque.
Robert Stacy McCain
Co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of
DONKEY CONS:
Sex, Crime & Corruption in the Democratic Party
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595550240
