Andrew Sullivan was probably the original political blogger I discovered after 9/11 in 2001.
I read him all the time in 2001-03.
He used to be on my list of
Writers on politics that I like.
But then he turned against the war.
Gradually almost everything he believed switched to the opposite.
He became exactly the kind of guy he would have attacked in 2001-03.
Now I never read him.
Andrew Sullivan
I read all the time in 2001-03.
But then he turned against the war.
It seems
Bush's anti-gay marriage policy drove him mad.
I had some sympathy for Sullivan.
I had problems with Bush too.
But Gay Marriage is simply not as important
an issue as the War on Islamist Terror.
Sullivan just can't swallow his pride and accept this.
He abandoned Bush because of this issue,
and spent years trying to justify it.
In 2004 he became obsessed with the Abu Ghraib scandal,
and endlessly wrote as if it was important,
and as if the WMD intelligence scandal was important,
and so on.
In the 2004 election, he supported Kerry,
and wrote
as if the
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth
were Republican dirty tricks, rather than what it was
- 200 people who hated Kerry for 30 years
and this was their moment.
He has switched sides and is now trying desperately to pretend that the Democrats
are strong on defence.
The old Andrew Sullivan
- the one who realised we are in a war to the death
with people who want to exterminate homosexuals
and lots of other groups
- is gone, sadly.
"From the very beginning, of course, the Bush administration's left-wing enemies in the U.S. and Europe
were hysterically opposed to the push for Middle Eastern democracy.
A significant number of right-wing pundits
also proved themselves to be sunshine patriots ...
bailing out of the hard, dirty work of war and cultural transformation as soon as the predictable resistance arose.
But that's politics.
In Washington, if you're looking for a brave and steadfast ally, you need to buy a dog.
Fortunately our warriors battling away in Najaf and Samarra and Anbar province didn't surrender to the Beltway gloom
that defeated most of our media and political elites."
The "conservative" who votes Democrat:
Sullivan supported Kerry (Democrat) for President in 2004.
Sullivan supported Obama (Democrat) for President in 2008.
And yet he still claims to be a "conservative".
If only there were more conservatives like him,
the Democrats would never be out of office!
Andrew Sullivan v. Christopher Hitchens, Apr 2008:
Sullivan is demolished by Hitchens,
as he (Sullivan) struggles to defend the dodgy, evasive Obama and
his mentor Rev. Wright.
I haven't read Sullivan in years, but I am still shocked.
How far he has fallen.
He has become Simon Jenkins
or Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a hopeless confused muddle,
all because he is driven by another agenda.
Survey of Andrew Sullivan's readers, Feb 2008.
Despite him claiming to be a "conservative", only affluent left wingers read him now.
"2.5 percent of you describe yourselves as very conservative; 9.6 percent as conservative; 33.3 percent as moderate; 38.1 percent as liberal; and 16.5 percent as very liberal.""Only 22 percent of you earn $50K or less. Another fifth earn between $50K and $75K. Well over half have household income of over $100K a year."
Charles Johnson on Andrew Sullivan, 5 Apr 2008:
"Not a shred of the post-9/11 Sullivan remains; all that's left is a rhetoric-spewing empty shill for "progressive" causes."
Today, that's how a lot of people feel about Charles Johnson.
I haven't paid attention to Andrew Sullivan for years, so I am always shocked when
someone points out what he is saying these days.
He writes as if Israel's nuclear supremacy is something sleazy,
rather than something that every sane person must hope lasts:
"Apparently, a lobby for a foreign government is useless if it cannot instantly get the US to launch World War III to maintain said foreign government's regional nuclear monopoly for a few more years."
When did Sullivan become just another anti-Israel freak?
In response to the encouraging news from Wikileaks that the Arab dictators want to stop Iran,
he points out that the Arab street are Israel-hating maniacs who think Iran is great.
Instead of just stating the facts - that for once the dictators make more sense than the people
- he attacks the "neo-cons" for siding with the dictators not the people.
He doesn't seem to care about Iran getting nuclear weapons.
He only cares about attacking "neo-cons".
He describes the Arab rulers as
"corrupt, gutless, torturing autocrats".
Fair enough.
But oddly he does not then describe the Arab street as
"blind, ignorant, conspiracy-theory driven, anti-semitic, west-hating Islamist lovers".
He does not criticise the Arab street at all.
Andrew Sullivan, Jan 2011, does not seem to know that JFK was killed by a communist.
Andrew Sullivan, Mar 2011, thinks that the accidental killing of civilians in a war zone in Afghanistan
"makes one reassess the justness of this long, long war".
Did he not know what war was
when he was promoting it in 2001-03?
Ron Paul
is the kind of creepy amoral libertarian that
says (Jan 2012) that the killing of an Iranian nuclear weapons scientist is "an act of terrorism and we should empathize with them"
[with Iran].
For years
I liked LGF and Charles Johnson.
He was secular,
pro-science,
classically liberal, and hostile to Islamism
because he believes in the Enlightenment.
I always liked him,
at least until his blog war
with Robert Spencer and others.
LGF was a great counter-jihad blog from 2001 to 2008.
But after 2008, it started getting progressively more boring.
First came the tedious blog war and linking war.
Then there is the obsession with creationism.
(I agree with him on creationism, but it's not what I want LGF for.
Professionals like
Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers
do that stuff a million times better than LGF.)
Then, after Obama won, LGF started to get obsessed with right-wing extremists
and other uninteresting people.
I would visit LGF, but then leave quickly because every entry would be
boring.
And it used to be one of the most lively sites on the Internet.
I finally dropped LGF
from my RSS feeds
in 2009.
Now I never visit.
Charles Johnson, 6 Oct 2006 (back when he was good),
magnificently fisks a useless
Agence France Presse propaganda piece
about the poor impoverished Palestinians:
"People who genuinely want to build a functioning society will start building it.
You can't stop them.
But the Palestinians have proven time and again that destroying the Jewish state takes precedence over creating a hopeful future for their children.
My tears are all dried up when it comes to the plight of the Palestinian people. I'll save my sympathy and support for those who deserve it."
Hard to believe now, but as late as 2008
LGF was still a good blog to visit.
See full size.
The LGF blog war
started as an argument between LGF and
the following anti-jihad blogs.
But it
escalated to become LGF v. just about all counter-jihad blogs.
I'm not really a
Fjordman fan.
For example, he
says
that:
"Islam in any way, shape or form does not belong in the West. Islam, and all those who practice it, must be totally and physically removed from the entire Western world."
Does Fjordman really propose ethnic cleansing of several million people,
and a permanent restriction on freedom of religion?
The argument began in 2007, mainly
over the nature of Vlaams Belang.
LGF was pointing out their anti-semitic
and neo-Nazi past (and perhaps present).
Some other counter-jihad blogs were defending them as now reformed allies against the jihad.
This, though, rather reminds me of
the claim that the BNP has "reformed".
I find
the sceptical view of these kind of Euro-nationalist groups
the most convincing.
Europe tends to get things wrong.
The French revolution is the American revolution, done wrong (leading to tyranny not democracy).
Europe of course got everything wrong in the 20th century, with fascism and communism,
while the English-speaking world carried on with democracy.
The EU is the United States, done wrong (done with contempt for democracy and states' rights).
Europe does immigration wrong compared to America (not integrating them,
not having a "European dream" for immigrants).
Europe does patriotism wrong compared to America (based on ethnicity not ideas).
And likewise,
Europe is likely to do the counter-jihad wrong too,
confusing it with racism, or white Christian supremacy.
Vlaams Belang
have a
racist, anti-semitic and neo-Nazi past
that they are trying to move beyond.
Whether they have succeeded or not I don't know.
But I would keep my distance for a while.
Robert Spencer:
"There is no doubt that the party has changed.
The question is whether or not the change is genuine or not."
Summary of the case against Vlaams Belang
makes a good point:
"my conclusion is that allying with Vlaams Belang would be strategically inept while providing little value, and would ... sap support for our anti-Islamofascist efforts.
This is the case whether VB is taking a course to reform or not. There is too much evidence from their own sites, manifestos, statements, party publications, and affiliated groups that their leadership is not distant enough from the stance on collaborators, identity politics, and immature political theater to make any alliance with them sane. Even if they are making whole-hearted honest efforts to reform, the track record is just not long enough. (Some in their leadership are I think, some others aren't.)
...
Associating with Vlaams Belang when they bring so little to the cause while carrying so much bad baggage is not only poorly thought out, it's also politically naive."
In short, it is a waste of energy for anyone on the anti-jihad side to attempt to defend
Vlaams Belang. They should just shrug and say: "I can understand why you don't like them.
I think they're reformed, but I understand if you think differently."
Charles Johnson escalates the dispute:
So I find
the LGF view of Vlaams Belang and similar European groups
the most convincing.
I think the blogs that defend Vlaams Belang have made a mistake.
It doesn't mean they are racist
- just that they've made a bad call on allies.
LGF should accept they are wrong but well-meaning,
and they in turn should accept that LGF and others like me
may honestly disagree with them.
But that's not what happened.
Charles Johnson
dramatically escalated the dispute by refusing to
link to people
who don't think VB are racist (like Gates of Vienna).
And then Charles Johnson
escalated further,
by refusing to
link to people who link to people
who don't think VB are racist (like Robert Spencer).
Even though I kind of agree with LGF about Vlaams Belang (!)
I gradually stopped reading LGF
because of this escalating link ban policy.
I agree with
Robert Spencer
that Charles Johnson's behaviour is absurd.
I think we should just not link to racists themselves, and leave it at that.
It got worse.
LGF started claiming that Robert Spencer is a racist.
Unable to quote anything Spencer actually said to support this,
LGF resorted to guilt-by-association,
associating Spencer with the beliefs of others he might have met
or had some contact with.
Simultaneous with this slander, and drift to the left,
LGF began getting really, really boring.
Out of habit, I would visit, hoping for the LGF of old to somehow be back,
and instead be presented with boring posts that would have me out of there in 1 or 2 minutes.
There's only so much you can take before you realise the old LGF is never coming back.
Shame. I liked it.
I cannot think of any major counter-jihad blog
that enthusiastically joins LGF in his war against these blogs.
Most of them are staying out of the way, or opposing him,
or dropping him silently.
LGF links to a lot of left-wing blogs that support him,
but support from any big counter-jihad blogs seems very silent.
When you're in a party of one, it might be a sign that you've got the wrong end of the stick.
I agree with
The Jawa Report on the LGF war, 30 Apr 2009.
He doesn't necessarily support Robert Spencer on all things, but he says:
"I'm not comfortable with the guilt-by-association accusations ... Robert Spencer may be a lot of things, but his views on liberty don't seem too much different than my own. ... Frankly, I'm not sure I understand the roots of the conflict. But from my vantage point the differences here are not irreconcilable. ... Please stop Charles."
Please Charles, Stop, The Jawa Report, September 10, 2009:
"I say this as a friend. Stop this misplaced guilt by association campaign you have been engaged in against Robert Spencer.
Robert is no extremist. You know this. Stop it.
... stop the guilt by association nonsense.
...
It's not even guilt by association. It's guilt by association with those who are guilty of association. Guilt by association, once removed."
Glen Reinsford
of
The Religion of Peace
is totally unimpressed with LGF:
"Filtering out contrary opinion also seems to have deepened Johnson's sense of moral certitude to the point that he is attacking former friends, such as Robert Spencer ...
with unnecessary hair-splitting and flimsy "guilt-by-association" slurs
...
In order to establish that the founder of Jihad Watch is a bigot (or Nazi) who hates Muslims and Jews, it is first necessary to ignore what Spencer actually says about Muslims, Jews, Nazis and bigotry. Once this restriction is in place, an intricate "Six Degrees" linkage is concocted between the hapless Spencer and real-life neo-Nazis
through some sort of Rube Goldberg-like sequence of personal associations.".
Hilarious comment:
"I am just waiting for the post by Charles stating that he is closing his website because he learned that he himself is linked to neo-Nazis through a 28-link chain of association."
Why can't LGF and the Guardian quote Robert Spencer?
The challenge to Charles Johnson from Robert Spencer
nicely expresses my problem with LGF:
"If Charles Johnson really thinks I am a neo-Nazi sympathizer or a racist,
let him produce even one line that I have written to support such a view."
That is, writings by Spencer himself,
rather than by someone else.
If Charles Johnson is ever able to do this,
let me know here.
Andrew Brown, The Guardian, 18 Aug 2010, writes an entire article against Robert Spencer
and yet nowhere does he bother to actually quote Spencer.
He uses the LGF strategy.
It's all about who once had dinner with who,
who shared a platform with who,
who linked to someone who linked to someone,
and so on.
But no actual quotes from Spencer himself.
He describes Spencer's site as "hate-filled"
and Spencer as part of
"far right hate groups".
Yet there is not a single quote from Spencer to prove this.
Not one!
Andrew Brown, The Guardian, 20 Jan 2011, again slanders Robert Spencer without bothering to actually quote him.
He refers to
"the preachers of hate on both sides, from Robert Spencer to Anwar al-Awlaki".
He compares Spencer to a fascist enemy leader who directs terror against America
and wants to destroy all human rights!
He doesn't bother providing a single quote from Spencer to show any similarity to al-Awlaki.
He doesn't provide any evidence that Spencer is a "preacher of hate".
Apparently Spencer and Geller are to blame for this, because of their campaign against the
Ground Zero mosque.
Charles Johnson
says the attacker's diary
"sounds exactly like the kind of stuff you can find all over Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer's blogs."
And he accuses Spencer and Geller of
"responsibility for creating a climate of hatred and bigotry in which violence flourishes."
"sounds like"?
"creating a climate"?
Very weak tea, Johnson. Very weak.
Why can't you find a quote from Spencer supporting the attack?
Or any such attack.
Why can't you quote Spencer?
LGF blogroll
is missing a lot of big counter-jihad names now.
LGF has
banned over 1,100 counter-jihad commenters
and de-linked loads of counter-jihad sites, the above and many more
(while they in turn have been de-linking him).
He's heading towards "a Counterjihad of One".
The Battle for the LGF Archives
- The Diary of Daedalus
is working on pointing out old, right-wing, counter-jihad stuff in LGF,
and LGF then deletes it.
Diary of Daedalus
says:
"we now know that we have the power in numbers, we have the tools, we have the motivation, and that we're a friggin' elite sniper team if we use them.
So I think I can speak for all the DoDers and LGF antagonists everywhere and say, "Bring It, CJ!" I for one am ready to battle until there is nothing left but "beach" open threads and "Tech Note" updates."
Image from
Tundra Tabloids
mocks the number of counter-jihad people that
Charles Johnson has
"thrown under the bus".
The quote is from
Gates of Vienna, Nov 2008:
"As the arbiter of membership in the Counterjihad, Charles Johnson has finally made it official: he's a Counterjihad of One."
Sept 2009: "We long ago stopped reading LGF.
Suffice it to say (suffice it for me to say, anyway) that Charles's political inclinations and interests now diverge widely from our own."
2009:
The link is deleted, and replaced with a note:
"Lotta Good Fine Blogs Out There; Why Not Try a New One Instead of Old Ones That Have Gone Off Their Trolley?"
Wikio's ranking of political blogs
(ranking blog influence based on links) shows LGF becoming irrelevant on the right. As at Oct 2009, their rankings show:
Hot Air
The Corner
Michelle Malkin
Gateway Pundit
Power Line
Atlas Shrugs
Dan Riehl
The Jawa Report
Ace of Spades
Jihad Watch
Iowahawk
Blackfive
The Belmont Club
LGF
John Hawkins, September 17, 2009:
"[LGF] used to be the best anti-radical Islam blog on the planet.
... Charles Johnson had something great going on with Little Green Footballs. He was making a difference in the fight against radical Islam. He was making a difference in American politics -- and you can ask Dan Rather about that -- but now, he's just left-of-center attack blog #854. What a waste."
John Hawkins, 2 Dec 2009:
"It's a terrible shame that someone who had the sort of success most bloggers could only dream of, crumpled it up and tossed it away."
LGF traffic, visits per month, Mar 2009 to Sept 2010.
From Quantcast.
LGF blocked Quantcast in Sept 2010.
Current LGF
ranking on Wikio.
It must be said that LGF has been moving up these rankings recently.
Maybe he really is picking up a new loony left readership.
Once upon a time,
LGF would have automatically jumped to the defence of any apostate from Islam.
Now they spurn her.
How far LGF has fallen.
Rifqa Bary
(and here),
high-profile teenage apostate from Islam,
ran away from home in July 2009 (age 16, nearly 17).
She is terrified she will be killed if she is sent back to her family.
On YouTube alone she is getting new death threats every day.
More death threats
here
and
here.
She was put in state care.
As well as her fear of her family, she had a problem with her immigration status,
and had to fear
possible deportation to Sri Lanka, where as an apostate her life would be in danger.
She is also seriously ill.
I presume all readers of LGF now are left-wing newcomers who never read the site before 2008.
I can't see how any right-winger or counterjihad person would read LGF.
As part of its strange mutation into a left-wing blog,
LGF says the War on Islamism is not so important any more, Jan 2010:
"It's not that the war on terror has finished. It's never going to be finished, but I think things have reached the point now where it's not as pressing as it was. Some of the measures we took to protect ourselves against extremists have been pretty effective."
Johnson, 23 June 2010,
says that
Acts 17 Apologetics
are
like the Taliban.
Yeah, apart from the suicide bombing and killing and torturing and oppression,
and gassing children, and stuff.
Interview of Charles Johnson, May 2012, by extreme leftists AlterNet.
(A Chomsky promotion
appears on the same page!)
Charles Johnson says:
"I was totally wrong about Barack Obama. That's one of my main regrets at this point. I really fell for a lot of the right wing propaganda, and I thought he was going to be a communist and a radical leftist and all that stuff. I believed a lot of the propaganda about him. If I could go back I would vote for him now, but we don't have that time machine yet."
Charles Johnson likes The Guardian and The Independent now:
Charles Johnson, 14 October 2010, writes his first ever media article. He chooses the most pro-jihad newspaper in the English-speaking world,
The Guardian,
a paper he formerly
spent years attacking.
He chooses as his topic not the Islamic jihad that still rages across the world,
but rather .. an attack on right-wing counter-jihad blogs.
What a tosser.
2006:
"Orwell's Newspaper"
- Charles Johnson on the anti-Israel UK newspaper
The Independent, June 28, 2006.
Here he compares
Eric Cantor talking to Israel behind Obama's back in 2010
to Nancy Pelosi talking to Syria behind Bush's back in 2007.
Um, maybe the difference is that Israel is an ally and Syria is an enemy, dumbass.
You used to know that.
The Diary of Daedalus says:
"It's only a matter of time before Chuck does a why I broke with Israel piece.
He's laying the seeds down."
The Diary of Daedalus
is always entertaining:
Charles Johnson, Mar 23, 2012:
"I really haven't been this disgusted with the Republican Party and the right in general in a long, long time."
The Diary of Daedalus is unimpressed:
"Charles Johnson is mad at the Right everyday."
Graphing the tags used on LGF posts vividly shows how the subject matter of the blog changed.
Graph from here.
Here we see how a once great anti-jihad blog stopped covering the jihad at all.
Instead it started covering boring leftie topics.
Far-left blogger Charles Johnson now describes the US Marines as far-right and "bloodthirsty".
A tweet war started between Johnson and
John Nolte
over the video of
marines urinating on dead Taliban, Jan 2012.
Loony left Johnson is shocked that people on the right are not appalled by this.
(I am also unappalled.)
It ended in this revealing tweet by Johnson on
14 Jan 2012.
Johnson, Jan 2012, calls anyone who criticises Obama a racist,
and pretends that some "centrists" exist who might listen to him.
But no such people exist.
No one is interested in what a far-left loony has to say about the right.
The
Diary of Daedalus
gives most people's response.
Charles Johnson, Mar 10, 2012, ends up defending the black racist
Louis Farrakhan.
How did our alleged "anti-racist" loon get into this mess?
Because he has to defend everything President Obama does.
Therefore he has to defend everything
Derrick Bell
does.
Therefore he has to defend
Louis Farrakhan as not so bad.
Hilarious:
Johnson's conversion is still not enough for
Oliver Willis of the
loony left
Media Matters for America.
Oliver Willis still calls him a racist in this tweet of 12 Mar 2012.
Everyone hates Charles Johnson!
Right-wing cleric supports arrest for blasphemy, 7 May 2012.
If he was a Christian right-wing cleric, Charles Johnson would have nothing to do with him.
Disgusting friends you have there, Charles.
He's a
9/11 truther:
"We have no conclusive proof of who committed 9/11, why the towers were ‘pulled’, why airplanes were modified, why steel melted at 800 degrees not 2,300 or the relevance of 'Operation Northwoods’. The pleas of the families for an inquiry are denied and the evidence has in the majority, been completely destroyed. However, any straw poll will almost entirely state it was the Moozlims."
He thinks Muslims are oppressed
rather than being
the oppressors.
"The Muslims of today are being put under an intolerable amount of suffering;
they face persecution and oppression the world over"
He hates Israel:
"Israel, arguably a terrorist state, is overwhelmingly core funded through the US and holocaust reparations."
"CuriousLurker"
is typical of the anti-counterjihad posters on
the useless site LGF these days.
She too
hates Israel.
"I am always surprised when someone sends me a link from the green swamp. No one reads this boil on the ass of the blogosphere anymore".
-
Pamela Geller, 5 Feb 2012, on the car wreck of Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs.
NOW BLOCKED
Since 1995.
