I don’t have the time for a full rebuttal of this “exposé” of Antiwar.com by Stephen Schwartz, but I’ll pick out a few of its more deceitful/asinine points:
* “If, as Mary McCarthy said, every word written by the Stalinist Lillian Hellman was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,’ Raimondo is a prevaricator down to the placement of commas, periods, and semicolons. One of his favorite tricks is the mendacious use of hyperlinks, giving the impression that his statements are backed by other sources. These are usually his own articles, immodestly declared by him to be ‘classics,’ which in fact have little or nothing to do with his latest ravings, but lead to more lies through more links.”
Mendacious use of hyperlinks??? Schwartz (who once threatened to sue Antiwar.com over a hyperlink!) apparently avoids mendacity by having a grand total of one link in his screed, but I’ll try to explain the practice to him anyway: hyperlinks give the reader an opportunity to judge for himself the accuracy of the writer’s claims. I will guarantee you that Justin Raimondo has NEVER quoted or paraphrased Schwartz without providing a hyperlink or other citation to an original source. And anyone can look at any of Raimondo’s columns at random and judge the veracity of Schwartz’s claim that his hyperlinks “are usually [to] his own articles.”
* “Raimondo’s website consistently published propaganda generated by Randall (Ismail) Royer, a former CAIR employee now doing a 20-year federal sentence for terrorist activities.”
Consistently is an odd adverb to use there; I’ll infer that it’s a mendacious synonym for “frequently.” Again, no link. But do a Google search on the infamous “paintball terrorist” and you’ll find that exactly one article by Royer has appeared on this site. As Jim Henley once joked in relation to the Royer smear,
- New Republic Writer Jim Henley is how I’d like to be referred to from now on. After all, I sold them a single article back in 1993. In Andrew Sullivan’s world (scroll down to “FIFTH COLUMN WATCH”), ever publishing a single article with a venue makes you a “[that venue] writer,” and – hey how about that – Andrew Sullivan was TNR’s editor when my article was published.
Maybe I’ll get new business cards.
* “Sometimes Raimondo posts other leftwing fascists to do his slandering for him. He has done this with Kevin Keating, infamous for hoisting a banner during the anti-Iraq demonstrations in San Francisco that read: ‘We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.'”
A link perhaps? Nope. Here’s the only reference to Kevin Keating on Antiwar.com, again via Google.
Perhaps Schwartz, like many folks his age, just needs a remedial course on surfing the Web?