Antiwar.com Blog

Forget Kyrgyzstan — what about Colorado?

Omigod! Are you ready for this shocking announcement from Steven Plaut trumpeted in his latest screed on David Horowitz’s Frontpage? Okay, here goes:

“We counted 14,400 web pages in which the names Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo appear together.” [emphasis in original]

Oh, the horror! The horror! And I have even worse news for Plaut: both my name and David Horowitz’s appear on at least that many web pages!

Wowee zowee! Somebody call 911!

I have an explanation, though, that might calm Plaut’s shattered nerves: you see, Stevie m’boy, there’s this thing we call the “Internet” …

In the process of writing the blog entry below — mocking the stupidly false stories about me and others spouted by the denizens of David Horowitz’s Frontpage — I realized something that is really beginning to bother me: I’m guilty of exactly the same thing.

My Monday column featured a memo allegedly penned by U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Stephen Young that I found on the website of the Kabar News Agency. Now, as soon as I read this piece I realized fully that a great deal of it was probably the product of someone’s imaginative literary gifts: oh, I thought, too bad I can’t use it! With the clock ticking on my deadline, and a little voice inside my head telling me “Let them deny it!”, I decided that at least part of it was probably true, and I made sure to cover my ass with an exculpatory paragraph at the very end, as well as a weasel-worded introduction to the material that gave several reasons why it could be at least partially authentic.

Part of the memo may well be real: but that isn’t good enough.

That was a mistake, one that, in retrospect, I greatly regret. After all, where do I get off complaining about how the Frontpagers are making up quotes and libeling people without any credible evidence — and then think I can pull stunts like that? It’s not right.

Without giving myself any excuses, I’ll just note that I’m currently recovering from a very mean bout with pneumonia. And none of this “well, it could be true, in a “metaphorical” sense. That’s bs. The War Party is doing enough evil in this world: it isn’t necessary to make anything up. All that’s necessary is to tell the truth, and, in this instance, I failed my readers miserably. I have to note that both my editors, Eric Garris and Matt Barganier, objected, but I brushed their concerns aside with my typical brusqueness.

My apologies, to one and all.

A group of liberal bloggers has issued an “Open Letter” protesting the inclusion of the infamous Jeff Gannon on a panel at the National Press Club. Now, don’t take it on my word that this crowd is a bunch of clueless whiners. Let them demonstrate it to you in their own inimitably whiny words:

“We, the undersigned bloggers, are very concerned about how liberal political bloggers are being systematically under-represented and belittled in the mainstream media, academic settings and media forums. By being intentionally excluded away from these venues, we are effectively pushed out of the discourse of opinion-leaders. The result is that the conventional wisdom about blogging, politics and journalism, as it concerns liberal blogs, becomes a feedback loop framed by the Conservatives and their media allies.”

“… we are faced with an entirely new situation that is more insult than misrepresentation. The discredited conservative media operative Jeff Gannon, neé Guckert, has been invited to sit on a panel at the prestigious National Press Club to talk about the scandal surrounding his access to the White House and more generally, the similarities and differences between bloggers and journalists. Guckert’s token liberal counterpart will be a gossip blogger and sex comedy blogger. While we have nothing but the greatest respect for Mr. Graff and Ms. Cox we believe that neither represents bloggers who write about hard-nosed politics. And as for Mr. Guckert, he isn’t a blogger, he’s barely a journalist, and not a single political blogger involved with the Gannon/Guckert scandal, or otherwise, has been invited to sit on the panel to counter Mr. Guckert’s arguments.

“Therefore, we the undersigned bloggers, respectfully but firmly insist that a serious political blogger such as John Aravosis, of Americablog.org be included on the panel to fairly and accurately represent our industry and us. Mr. Aravosis has agreed to our request that he serve on the panel as our representative and is available should such an invite be forthcoming.

“This situation is simply unacceptable. We will push back against the growing bias and sloppiness we see in the mainstream media as it concerns serious political blogging. If we do not we will never achieve any semblance of balance in the media. If we do not, we abdicate our ability to tell our own side of the story. If we do not we leave it to others to define us and defame us. “

A more insufferable prissiness would be hard to imagine. These people really take themselves far too seriously — and their only problem is that nobody else does.

And why, pray tell, should Gannon have to sit on the same panel with John Aravosis — because Aravosis is gay? Is that it? Sheesh, talk about oppressive — do we really have to “balance” out a gay conservative with a gay liberal? Does this mean Ann Coulter has to be “balanced” out by the liberal blonde of their choice? What a sad commentary on the “enlightened” liberals of our era, who think in such petty narrow-minded terms.

Speaking of petty and narrow-minded, the blogger known as “Billmon” posts an outburst of sex-phobic babbling that sounds like Jerry Falwell on hallucinogens:

“What’s next? An interactive NPC panel session on masturbation? A guest lecture on bestiality and blogging? A press conference by the North American Man Boy Love Association? No, wait, the House isn’t in session this week.

“I hate to sound like a prude here, but this is one of those moments when I start to think the fundamentalist gizmos might just be right.”

Look, I’m no Jeff Gannon fan, but Billmon is right: he does sound like a prude. And a hateful one at that. The problem with Gannon isn’t that he’s “the world’s only conservative gay prostitute journalist with a blog” — and I can guarantee you that isn’t true — it’s that Gannon was an administration plant, a shill who reported for a partisan front organization disguised (but not very well) as a “news agency.” So Jeff Gannon is a gay conservative — so what? So is Andrew Sullivan. So am I. So are any number of gay people — who, I hate to break it to Billmon, are not uniformly Barney Frank liberals. We are everywhere, bud.

As for the prostitute angle — again, so what? At the age of 43, he’s charging a thousand bucks a session — and getting it. The problem with most people, however, is that they can’t even give it away. And that, I’ll bet, is the case with the liberal blogger-geeks and policy wonks who signed that ridiculous “Open Letter.”

UPDATE: Talk about “homophobia” — a word I hate, but this time it fits — this just about says it all.

Remember how the elections in Kyrgyzstan were supposed to have been “rigged”? That was the reason for the “Tulip Revolution,” or the “Pink Revolution,” or whatever is going on in one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the former Soviet Union. The “revolution” appears to have gone full circle, however, with the newly-installed “President,” Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who seized power in a violent coup, now recognizing the Parliament elected under allegedly fraudulent conditions.

In reality, however, Akaev was one of the more liberal leaders in the region, who was called “a true Jeffersonian democrat” by Clinton administration deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott in 1994. Of course, Talbott was the same person who thought the Kosvo “Liberation” Army — a band of narco-terrorists and thugs — was worthy of U.S. support.

In any event, the fickleness of the world-conquering Americans, and the suddenness with which the U.S. government moved in to overthrow the Kyrgyz regime, which it had previously backed with such rhetorical hyperbole, is documented by Craig R. Smith in the New York Times:

“The money earmarked for democracy programs in Kyrgyzstan totaled about $12 million last year. Hundreds of thousands more filters into pro-democracy programs in the country from other United States government-financed institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy. That does not include the money for the Freedom House printing press or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz language service.”

The idea that the Krygyz events, which ended in confusion and mindless looting and violence — violence, I might add, that was initiated by the U.S.-funded “revolutionaries” — is part of a “democratic wave” sweeping across the former Soviet Union is finally coming in for some debunking. As Elinor Burkett — author of So Many Enemies, So Little Time, an account of her days teaching in Kyrgyzstan — writes in today’s New York Times:

“It’s a good story, but I’m afraid that plugging the political upheaval of this poor Central Asian nation into the paradigm du jour is akin to stuffing an elephant into a gorilla skin.”

The “democracy”-mongers, among them many of the same people who hail the “democratization” of Iraq at gunpoint, don’t care about the reality: they just like a good story. After all, they don’t have to live in Kyrgyzstan. But some people do have to live there, and they aren’t liking the “revolution” one bit. As Burkett writes:

“As the wealthy and ambitious jockey for power, the people of Bishkek are digging out and blaming the self-styled rebels from the south for the destruction of their city, heaping contempt on what they deem an illiterate peasantry.The long-standing divide between the two halves of the country – linked by a single, often impassable road over the mountains – has been ratcheted up. Few in Kyrgyzstan are basking in the glow of hope that lighted up Ukraine in December. As one friend in Bishkek said in a recent e-mail message to me: “This is not a democracy. This is just a crowd.”

I’m having such fun with those wacky craaaaazy zonked-out jokesters over at Frontpage — the neoconservative equivalent of Ken Kesey’s Prankster Bus — that I can hardly stand it. First it’s the screaming headline on Horowitz’s blog this morning — “Saddam Hussein website comes to the defense of Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo and attacks us“!, since changed to “Pro-Saddam Hussein website comes to the defense of Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo and attacks us”! — and now it’s a hallucinatory entry by Steven Plaut, a professor of business at the University of Haifa, on their “Moonbat Central” weblog that shows how the moonbats have taken over the sanitorium:

“In Frontpage Magazine we commented today on the intimate web of collaboration and mutual endorsements between Professor Juan Cole and Dennis “Justin” Raimondo. Raimondo then went and posted a series of characteristically hysterical libelous rants in the Go Postal section of the FPM web page under a false name until an attentive reader “outed” him from his closet.”

Plaut must be smoking some pretty strong Haifa hash to really believe what he is writing. Does he think I have nothing better to do than futz around on Frontpage’s dopey bulletin board, where nut-jobs named “Donal” and “Morganfrost” hurl obscene invective at each other? Besides that, you have to go through this long process of registering and logging-in, just in order to jump into Horowitz’s snake-pit. Hardly worth it. What I’d like to know is through what mysterious process did this anonymous “reader” “out” me — what did he (she?) use, a dowsing rod?

Get real, Plaut, and put down the crack pipe. You’ve already embarrassed yourself and your nutso employer by making up silly quotes and putting them in Juan Coles’s mouth.

What’s telling here is that Plaut’s opionion of his readers is so low he’s willing to spout nonsensical drivel that gives new meaning to the phrase made famous by Richard Hofstadter: the paranoid style in American politics.

Speaking of paranoia: The unmistakable insignia of mental disorder are all over Horowitz’s website: e.g., the “Discover the network” database that purports to have the inside story on insidious “subversives” (my regular readers will be thrilled to know that I’m a “leftist,” according to Horowitz’s witch-hunters — a fact bound to surprise my colleagues over at The American Conservative, where I’m a contributing editor.)

The rest of Plaut’s nutty blog entry is really a scream, if you like your humor heavily ironic. He urges his readers “to help our [sic] the Cole-Raimondo team in doing research and in developing their conspiracist theories” by mailing a sock to Antiwar.com headquarters and to the office of Professor Juan Cole, and helpfully provides our address. Isn’t that cute?

These guys aren’t the Merry Pranksters — they’re the Scary Paranoids.

Plaut rants on about “Joos” and “conspiracism” — suddenly the Sunday Herald, a respected Scottish daily, is a “Scottish conspiracist journal” — and avers that I’m “the godmother of a grand conspiracy theory.” That’s because all gay men are really women, you see, at least according to the Israeli branch of the Taliban.

Defending Kahanist terrorists, spewing bigoted venom, and telling lies — put a sock in it, Plaut, before you choke on your own bile.