{"id":1968,"date":"2005-03-29T23:09:49","date_gmt":"2005-03-30T06:09:49","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-03-29T23:09:49","modified_gmt":"2005-03-30T06:09:49","slug":"put-a-sock-in-it-plaut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/29\/put-a-sock-in-it-plaut\/","title":{"rendered":"Put a sock in it, Plaut"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m having such fun with those wacky craaaaazy zonked-out jokesters over at Frontpage — the neoconservative equivalent of Ken Kesey’s Prankster Bus<\/a> — 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<\/a>“!, since changed to “Pro<\/b>-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>, a professor of business at the University of Haifa, on their “Moonbat Central” weblog that shows how the moonbats have taken over the sanitorium:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/i><\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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<\/i>, where I’m a contributing editor.) <\/p>\n

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<\/i>, and helpfully provides our address. Isn’t that cute?<\/p>\n

These guys aren’t the Merry Pranksters — they’re the Scary Paranoids.<\/p>\n

Plaut rants on about “Joos” and “conspiracism” — suddenly the Sunday Herald<\/a>, 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<\/i>, you see, at least according to the Israeli branch of the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Defending<\/a> Kahanist terrorists<\/a>, spewing bigoted venom, and telling lies<\/a> — put a sock in it, Plaut, before you choke on your own bile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}