"Fair enough, Mr. Johnson". What has happened to Little Green Footballs?

[beachmom]

Two days ago, Andrew Sullivan linked to this one hour bloggingheads between Charles Johnson the founder of Little Green Footballs and Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation. I think it is worth watching, as it is how Mr. Johnson has announced he has "left the Right":

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/24971

I actually had gotten some inkling toward this when I found some things he had written about how his former allies in the war on terror, notably Gateway Pundit and Atlas Shrugged, were tied to neo Nazis in Europe. I found it to all be a bit strange, this infighting within the Right. But then the 2008 campaign went into full throttle and I forgot about it. It ends up that Charles Johnson hates the Religious Right, the tea party set, Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, the John Birch Society, and homophobia, among other excesses of the Right. In fact, he says the turning point for him was when Palin was named the VP, and he saw her performance with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson. He did support McCain but basically after Obama was inaugurated has completely trained his guns on the Right. Don't believe me? Go to his blog and look. It's remarkable.

After I watched the video, I thought this was a piece of good news, but then I got to thinking, and I felt less happy about it. After a search through his archives I was very upset again about what happened in 2004. For Little Green Footballs was a blog that shilled for evil, lies and smears for too long, and this sudden "transformation" doesn't add up. Charles Johnson is like T Boone Pickens. He's changed, yet he actually hasn't changed a bit. If you watch at the beginning, Mr. Johnson talks about what made him famous: Memogate, when he proved that the documents shown in the 60 Minutes II segment about Bush's military service were forged, or at least not typed on an old typewriter from the time period. Then he revealed, what I view as a bombshell: that although he thought it awful that phony documents were inserted in the middle of a presidential election, he felt the basic story WAS true: that Bush had used connections to get out of serving in Vietnam! How nice, years and years after the fact, that Mr. Johnson let us know what he really thought. See, his work was not in defense of George W. Bush but working for the truth. Then I checked his archives.

Non-stop swiftboating from August 2004 and onward. He also covered The Joke. And The Lonely Photo. Here is what Greg Sargent had to say when he had completely debunked their nonsense:

Three of the most prominent bloggers in the conservative blogosphere -- PowerlineBlog's Scott Johnson, Michelle Malkin, and Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs -- have now responded to my post. And they've all acknowledged that the "lonely Kerry" story they all promoted is completely bogus. Yet to a person, every one of them is either continuing to insist that the troops despise Kerry, or asserting that, hey, it doesn't really matter if they smeared someone relentlessly with outright falsehoods.

So we know that Charles Johnson is a known liar when it suits his agenda. But do we use his posts now to prove something? He actually did a lot of work exposing the racism of the tea party set. Link or no? Thing is, he is no David Brock. I am sure if you asked him, he would say he has no regrets for anything he has said on the blog. He has just "moved on" and actually just finished an incredible purging of all right wingers from his comment section. Now some right wingers are anti-social and racist, etc. but I checked the comments to a latest post and it was all sycophantic praise of Johnson. That means people who civilly disagreed were also chased away.

So what can one conclude from all of this? That the snooty arrogant Conn Carrall has a point when he rolled his eyes and kept saying "fair enough" when he would give up on Johnson on a particular topic. I am not talking about Conn's views or debating skill (ridiculous and not good, respectively). I just find it interesting that right wingers feel SMEARED by Mr. Johnson. Let's just say a lot of Democrats have been in that boat. Again, check the archives when the "crazies" who Johnson now calls Beck & friends were academics on the left following 9/11.

Oh, and final thing: Johnson voted for Gore in '00. Prepare for him to have several more "transformations" in his lifetime.

[karynnj]

1. Wow,

Those shifts are really beyond unbelievable. It is hard to find any coherent intellectual space that he could really inhabit. More transformations it likely will be.

[wisteria]

2. I don't trust this guy at all. I get the feeling he is all about shock and where he can make the

most money. I see nothing wrong in using him if needed, but I don't think he will be reliable in the long term. I consider him despicable for what he has said about Senator Kerry.