Earlier today I noted that numerous people owed Andrew Breitbart an apology.
Among those people was Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs who accused Andrew Bretibart of “smearing” Weiner with “phony” accuastions. Now that Bretibart has been vindicated, is Charles willing to man up and apologize? Hell NO (emphasis mine):
And I’ve been getting a flood of hate mail, much of it demanding that I “apologize” for something. So here’s my official response to this demand:
Not a freaking chance. If Weiner admits to sending the pictures in question, I’ll be surprised and disappointed, but I’m never going to apologize for calling it as I see it.
And I’m certainly never going to apologize for pointing out that Andrew Breitbart is a sleazy fraudster, with a well-documented and very tawdry history of deception.
So to those demanding that I apologize: try holding your breath until you turn blue. Maybe that will do it.
UPDATE at 6/6/11 1:33:21 pm
And there we have it; Rep. Weiner has admitted to sending the pictures, in an abject apology. But he says he’s not going to resign.
UPDATE at 6/6/11 2:13:16 pm
Just to be absolutely clear about this: yes, Andrew Breitbart got this one right. But again, I will never apologize for doubting his credibility. He’s smeared too many innocent people, he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, and getting it right this one time does not change those facts.
At the end of Weiner’s press conference, under questioning, Weiner stated that he apologized to Andrew Breitbart. How interesting that Charles is incapable of doing the same.
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Comments
We've come a long way from 9/11 and Charles got over his momentary lapse into conservatism. He's rejoined the fruitcake brigade again.
Charles Johnson's refusal to admit his mistake and apologize to Breitbart tells us all we need to know about Mr. Johnson's ethics.
Oh Hell, Breitbart can take a number. The line of people Charles has slimed is a long one.
Charles is a fine one to talk about "smearing" people.
Who is Charles Johnson? And why should anyone care? LGF looked like a good place for ignorant "progressives" to congregate at, the one time I visited. Let them send little tingles up each others' legs, and just ignore them. Or am I missing something?
I used to follow LGF years ago but like Sully he jumped the shark with his BDS. I'm sure Breitbart is devastated he's not getting Johnson's apology 😉
B'rer Johnson, sezee
"So to those demanding that I apologize: try holding your breath until you turn blue. Maybe that will do it."
Hmmmm. Perhaps we now know how Charles Johnson "turned blue" . . . he held his breath for waaaaay too long!
Sad!
I stopped thinking about him after my account was banned for a post suggesting LGF was a shadow of its 2006 self.
What happened to CJ? He used to be the GO TO blog for all things middle-east and bike racing. The last time I went to LGF was after Lance Armstrong was accused of doping (the most recent time), and all he had on his blog was a bunch of really bitter, spiteful posts about specific people. It's like he's fallen into a deep well of personal grudges and ax-grinding.
Site name change is in order: Little Yellow Footballs. I refuse to man up. After I go for a bike ride, I'm going to play with my guitar..
Mr. Johnson has gone full bitter madman. Once you go that far, you cannot really come back – short of meds, perhaps.
So, Charles claims that because Breitbert has, in his view, smeared people in the past, then he has lost all credibility, now and forever.
Now, in the context of Weinergate, Charles has publicly and unabashedly smeared Andrew Breitbart.
Therefore, by his own rules, Charles has irrevocably forfeited all credibility forevermore.
Someone should tell Charles that thickheaded absolutism is rarely a good policy.
Why would anyone care if Chuck apologizes? It's like getting an apology from the guy who squeegees your windows at a stop light.
Of course he won't apologize, Chuckles Johnson is a petty, vindictive, man spirited little piss-ant of a man.
He used to have little form on his side bar where people could send him messages. One day somebody sent him a message cussing him out. A normal blogger would have just rolled their eyes and hit the delete button.
Not chuckles — his honor was besmirched or something.
He posted the guy's IP address in the clear, in violation of his own privacy policy, in a thread dedicated to the vital topic. Then he figured out what company the IP address was connected with and posted about a bajillion rants and raves in the thread that demanded the company fire the person because they were goofing off on company time.
Ka-boing!
To use an old expression — the guy's got bats in his belfry.
I have long regarded LGF a hate site. Going there, when I used to do it occasionally, made me feel like I'd been slimed.
I don't think Charles Johnson even likes himself. I wonder why the liberals are so mean and hateful. Why can't they be nice like us?
The sad thing about Johnson isn't that he won't apologize (though he ought to). It's that he — the hero of Rathergate — can't acknowledge that he fell hook, line, and sinker for one terrible exculpatory story after another on #Weinergate, when the truth was obvious from very early on.
You'd think that sort of thing would make CJ start questioning whether his ideological conversion has been for better or worse, at least as far as being able to see and state the truth is concerned.
Does anybody still look at LGF ? I quit years ago.
Chuckles didn't express a general opinion of Breitbart, he made a specific charge. An apology is in order, but since Chuckles is long since out-of-order, it won't be issued.
Charles Johnson was always a vicious sleazeball. He was just, for a short period of time, a vicious sleazeball on the right side of an important issue. It's high time people realize that he wasn't a better person simply because, for that little while, he was right.
I just read this on The DC Caller: [according to Barbara Walters] If Sarah Palin can still ride around on her bus and be considered as a possible president, this man can override this, stay in congress and just hope there is another scandal that will take him –”
However, once again Walters contention was protested by Behar, who has a track record of not being a supporter of Palin.
“Let me defend Sarah for 30 seconds,” Behar protested. “The woman has no sex scandal in her dossier, in her arsenal. This is a completely different thing from Sarah Palin. And I want to defend her here.”
First Walters makes an idiotic analogy and then Behar defends Sarah Palin. O. M. G.
I too, used to visit LGF quite regularly. The fact that I quit reassures me that I'm able to recognize madness when I see it.
"It's like he's fallen into a deep well of personal grudges and ax-grinding."
That happens quite a bit, though LGF is one of the worst. People do have a natural inclination to take things personally, but it was more than that.
My theory as to why: At some point, CJ started, reasonably enough, to notice that some elements of the left and right were extremist. And I think this happened because of the personal nature of blogging.
A naïve observer would assume that a natural property of extremism is that it's obvious. In fact, most extremists take great pains to blend in and be socially acceptable, so the opposite is true.
So CJ had observed that some people were extremist. Now, he has always been a moderate, I don't think he ever claimed to be terribly conservative, so he had plenty of lefty readers. And they happily pointed out that conservative X was associating with a known extremist.
Well, if extremism is obvious, the only reason to associate with an extremist is if you too are extremist. On pretty much that evidence, he then accused people, mostly on the right, of being extremist. Simultaneously, the right responded with indignation and pointed out that the associations were BS, while the left told him how courageous he was. He had a lot of friends on the right, so many bridges were burnt in a very public manner, and all this reinforced his belief that conservatives are all basically nazis and that they had used him to get various people.
Dodge, obfuscate and move the goalposts around. Sounds like the post 2008 Charles Johnson to me….picked a strange (medium-sized) hill to die on so to speak
I'll never forget my shock and confusion when I returned to LGF after not reading any political blogs for a year a couple years back. While the question is getting old for me: what they heck happened to Charles? Like, really. Seems like at some point, he went from clear and principled to muddled and bizarre. The odd personal sniping. The weird lack of responsibility when he is wrong. The banning of commenters who are civil, yet offer differing view-points. I would love to hear the story from Glenn and Roger on what went on behind the scenes at Pajama in the initial days while CJ was still involved.
He might apologize the second Andrew apologizes to Shirley Sherrod? Maybe?
"He might apologize the second Andrew apologizes to Shirley Sherrod?"
For what? Breitbart's original coverage of Sherrod included her epiphany that she was reacting on the basis of race instead of on class. His entire point in covering the event was about how the NAACP crowd reacted to her description of that original racist reaction.
He's not responsible for the Obama Administration forcing her to pull her car off to the side of the road to resign from her job via cell phone because they wanted it over before Glenn Beck's TV show started.
Breitbart did nothing wrong. He has nothing to apologize for.
The noble White Knight Charles is making a principled stand to honour the memory of his fallen товарищ Shirley Sherrod.
No! Just Ice! No Peas!
Even if you take into account that Weiner apologized to Breitbart only because he was put on the spot, Weiner STILL has more class than Chuckles. I'm sure Chuckie is proud of that.
Tim, you're a tool. Mr. Breitbart posted Ms. Sherrod's own words and the audience's reaction to them. The words showed Ms. Sherrod to be someone who once made a racist, spiteful decision. The audience's laughter showed the audience to be vindictive racists. Then Ms. Sherrod's further words showed she had learned and grown from her mistake, all to her credit. All of that was in the initial video Mr. Breitbart posted.
Ms. Sherrod's admission that she was wrong only made the audience look more racist. And then President Obama overreacted and fired Ms. Sherrod.
The only apologies required here are from President Obama (who I believe probably did so in private) and the audience.
And why the heck would Andrew apologize to Sherrod? What he said she said, she said…on tape.
As for Johnson, between 2004 and 2006 something happened to Charles. Something bad. Perhaps he hit his head or was taken over by aliens or something. I've never witnessed such a complete and utter reversal of beliefs and slide into craziness. It's really very sad.
Gee whiz, people, it's not deep psychological analysis: his deal with the Pajamas Media co-founders didn't work out like he planned, they cut him loose, and in a fit of jealous pique he decided that Conservatives are mean poopy-heads and he didn't want to play with them anymore. So he went on his own Quixotic quest to become Amazon's #1 affiliate site and get rich that way. It's all about the money — specifically, about his severe lack of it.
I still have an account at that pest hole of a site, under another name, that I haven't used in years. Wonder what the best way to go out in a blaze of glory might be. Any suggestions?
I will say that he served a valuable purpose in exposing the Dan Rather/Killian forgeries. He can be forgiven a lot for helping to ensure that the worthless fraud John Kerry was kept away from the levers of power. But he has really become a vindictive and peculiar little prick since then. I do not go there at all anymore.
Skookum John: I have several suggestions. None of which I think Professor Jacobson would be comfortable with me posting here, due to the generally family-friendly content of this blog. But if you're interested, one of them involves ferrets. 🙂
I went over to LGF to read the comments after the Weiner press conferences. It was a joy and a half to see the ten or so posts in a row right after he copped to tweeting his d***-ture. All of them along the lines of "Oh noes! I can't believe it!" When anyone with a brain who had been reading accounts on blogs from both sides (as I do) saw this coming a mile away…so really, what DOES that say about them?
Schadenfreude…
@Tim June 6, 2011 6:55 PM |
No, Andrew is owed an apology by a significant number of false accusers on the Pigford story as well, including those who falsely accused him of dishonest editing of the Shirley Sherrod tape. Andrew has thoroughly and convincingly debunked those baseless accusations made against him.
I personally have no knowledge of what Charles Johnson may or may not have said on that particular issue because, for the most part, I stopped reading his rubbish at LGF, and removed the link from my site. So I won't attempt to address that aspect of it.
But suffice it to say that Johnson became a thoroughly disreputable blogger quite some time ago, and he emerged as a petty, nasty hater toward those who disagreed with him, as has been well-documented by many former commenters on his site who were treated very shabbily by him.
It is just that his level of dishonesty on this latest issue was so palpable that there was really no honorable way out for him, except to apologize.
His refusal to do so, as they say, speaks volumes.
Seriously…go over to LGF at the following link and start reading about comment #140. Beautiful.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/38686_Anthony_Weiner_Schedules_Press_Conference_to_Deal_with_Latest_Accusations/comments/#ctop
i, too, was banned from LGF several years ago…the only time such a thing has happened to me…i was shocked and still have no idea what my offense was other than, apparently, having some mild opinion that differed from mr. johnson's. i don't see the point of having posted comments if all you want is for people to agree with you and tell you how great you are. i haven't bothered to ever visit the site again and haven't missed it one bit. what johnson thinks about weiner or breitbart is meaningless to anyone but himself.
I know that somewhere on this site is a serious and insightful blog written by someone smart and well-educated. Someone who is worthy of being a law professor at a top legal school…. But I shouldn't have to sift through so much dreck to find it. Weinergate, or Palin's strange theory of history really deserve your time and intelligence? I feel like the Titanic is going down, and we are not even arguing about the deck chairs, we are arguing about the ants on the ship. It may be entertaining, but the ship is still going down.
No one made you read the post, Muriel.
Charles "Icarus" Johnson, the failed jazz guitarist/blogger, can now be known as nothing less than the Dan Rather of the blogosphere.
Johnson is a thin-skinned prick. I questioned ONE of his posts as being "Kos-like" and he banned me for life–this after I gave him the scoop on the Soros-McClellan connection. I'm not sure what happened, but he's definitely come unhinged.
@Mason . . . like this one. (My favorite because you can literally see the look on his face!)
But I'd say this one is a very close runner up.
Heh!
Best to clip that barb off before you try to pull the hook back through your cheek, boys!
Ole Charlie "Blue-Face" Johnson got ya all hooked on a bad line!
@Muriel
I haven't been able to have a discussion with my friends and family about the ills of our national debt, obamacare, class warfare, etc. in the last 2 years when they've been conditioned to disregard these issues by the Media Complex, through its systematic character assassination of Conservative figures; Abusive ad hominem.
Weinergate is an exhibit of how Politicians can readily count on left-wing 'journalists' to promote a lie, slander Conservatives and…ultimately discredit their position.
The more my friends and family know this, the better for our country.
And I'm glad there are places I can send them to for that info…like this blog.
Just got banned from lgf for posting:
"way to take the high road, Charles (sarcasm)"
Man has thin skin. So it goes.
Maybe the only guy who owes an apology more than Charlie Blue is Chris Matthews, who has now suggested — about Weiner's wife, Huma, "Maybe she's partly responsible."
Someone please remind me again, why is he still on the air?
Does anybody read LGF anymore?
Charles Johnson is a creep. It should be obvious to anyone.
Breitbart owes Sherrod a huge apology. He ran a maliciously edited video from a questionable source and accused her of racism.
It's hypocritical to expect Johnson to apologize but say Breitbart doesn't need to apologize to Sherrod.
Skookum John,
Re your question about what to post at LGF: This is what got me banned within a minute of posting; several minutes later my comment was deleted.
"I don't think anybody cares too much about how much your credibility has diminished, Charles. It's your astounding lack of judgment that you should apologize for.
That and your knee jerk reactions make your site far less compelling, informative, and interesting that even yesterday.
Try to regain some sense of objectivity, fella. Otherwise enjoy your voyage through the swamps.
Oh, and some useful advice: stop digging."
It shouldn't take much to upset either Charles or his gatekeepers.
Brian Hancock,
Just insult him over here. You know the pathetic little weasel is glued to his screen reading our snark.
Hi Chuckles! Hope you weren't planning on taking up a career as a PI investigating Twitter crimes, 'cause your track record in that department kinda blows chunks.
Come on, cut Johnson some slack, he's just a little sensitive about name/penis puns.
Pet hypothesis: Chuckchuckie-J is hoping that one day he'll say something so mind-bendingly asinine & simultaneously banal that MMFA will be grudgingly forced to make him a Señor Fellow.
rcade said…
Breitbart owes Sherrod a huge apology. He ran a maliciously edited video from a questionable source and accused her of racism.
It's hypocritical to expect Johnson to apologize but say Breitbart doesn't need to apologize to Sherrod.
So, let me get this right: inferred accusations of racism, even when true, require an apology from the purported accusor? I just want to make sure we're on the same page here.
Who gives a shit if the douchebag apologizes. Brietbart got all the vindication he needed today and don't think he needs to hear anything from anyone.
Regarding this subject of this post, that Charles at LGF did not apologize, I'd say it's worth noting. And why? Well why not hammer his integrity deeper into the ground–nail, coffin and all that. If he gets a few more visitors to his site temporarily, the visitors go in with a familiarity of his idiocy.
Pummel libs when they are this easily exposed–it's a good thing.
Charles who?
LGF is one of the creepiest things I have read, and I am in the middle of a Steven King book.
We have an expression in the UK, and Charles Johnson is certainly a bit Dagenham.
To understand the expression find a London railway (railroad) map, and note that on the railway out towards Southend-on-Sea, Dagenham is two stops beyond Barking.
Charles Johnson is a creep and LGF a collection of raving insane nasty BS from a guy who's a wizard at high tech, but a moron at life itself. Barking mad Dagenham is a nice thing to call a nasty psychopath and marginal paraphiliac like Johnson.
Not that anyone should respond to CJ's ravings, but Breitbart also "got it right" with ACORN & wasn't responsible for any editing of that NAACP hag's rant about hating whitey. Thank God for Andrew and his flying squad of REAL JOURNALISTS doing the work that the lazy misfits in the lamestream MSM are too lazy or too afraid to do—telling the truth about Obama's RICO scams may get their career's in permanent retrograde.
Don't apologize, Charles! Keep this thing going! It's nuclear hot now and not going away anytime soon since we get more revelations by the hour now. How about another ten days of Weinergate! I'm sure the Dems would love that.
Charles is apparently feeling a little bit of heat, as he is now offering to apologize but ONLY if Breitbart firs apologizes "to Shirley Sherrod, Planned Parenthood, and ACORN, for smearing them with dishonestly edited videos.
Which I don’t expect to ever happen, of course. And I can guarantee that I will defend Andrew Breitbart’s next smear target, too — with no apologies."
So, Chuck wants no part of the truth, including on into the future!
"Breitbart owes Sherrod a huge apology. He ran a maliciously edited video from a questionable source and accused her of racism."
The questionable source that edited the video: the NAACP.
Try leaving any criticism of Johnson in the comment section of any LGF post. No matter how mild, polite and non-threatening it is, it will be deleted, and the "account" (the computer it was sent from) will be "blocked." I speak from personal experience.
Breitbart faces his critics head on. Johnson runs from them. What else do you need to know?
BTW for any that want to give Chuckles the benefit of the doubt and believe that his critics are just disgruntled banned (for cause) ex-commenters?
I was banned for the sole reason of commenting at the Blogmocracy website. Formed by some of his original detractors the site acted for quite a while as a place to comment and vent about his insanity and the lengths to which some of his commenters would go to kiss his ass.
A comment was made about a past commenter at LGF at Blogmocracy and wondered if their comments were still archived (Chuckles is a full range censor he not only bans you in the present he bans you from the past. He also edits his own posts if they disagree too much with his current positions) immediately after I went searching the archives on LGF, I was banned. NO OTHER ACTIONS WERE TAKEN BY ME; NO BAD LANGUAGE, NO BAD COMMENT, NO OVERBOARD CRITICISM. NOTHING.
Charles gives Censorship a bad name.
I went to LGF to try and post a few choice comments calling this moron out on his BS. Guess what? Registration is closed!
WOW. WHAT. A. PUSSY.
Maybe Herr Johnson could provide us with a detailed list of all the frauds perpetrated by Mr. Breitbart. No BS, just facts. If this punk thinks he smeared Sherrod, he needs to go over the evidence several more times until he gets it! Breitbart cleared the matter up after it was revealed that the damaging tape was edited by the useless NAACP.The smear was on Breitbart. It's hard to see when your head is inserted between your glutes.