“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”
Johnson, if I recall correctly, identified as a Democrat prior to 9/11, so maybe his defection isn't as unexpected as one might think. His disciples, for their part, are not happy:
When they talk about Johnson today, the rest of the terrorism-focused bloggers alternate between anger and regret. He has smeared them, they say, and according to Dymphna he’s “destroyed a lot of networking that was beginning to emerge” between American and European critics of Islamic extremism. “He’s really gone off the deep end,” Geller said, pointing to Johnson’s more and more frequent criticisms of creationists, such as the attack on the anti-evolution, Glenn Beck-inspired event, which made the host angry enough to lash out at LGF on his show. “He’s a leftist blogger now.”
Yeah, evolution. That's really wild stuff, that is.
3 comments:
Hey, Chuck:
One of us...one of us...one of us...
The timing indicates that Johnson has realized that the American public's willingness to be terrified has dimmed and that he's going to be on the political losing side unless he can clean that side up. None of this rhetoric or alliances that he now criticizes was new in October 2007, but what was new was that Republicans the prior year had lost their Congressional majorities, and as of that time were not fielding any presidential candidate for 2008 whose personal appeal was sufficient to overcome the mud on the GOP brand.
Policing your own side for excess when they're in the minority is just basic political savvy, not a sign of any underlying change in ideology either of the policeman or his side.
All the people I've seen describing themselves as having been Democrats before 9/11 and now being "neoconservatives" or some other variant had indications of "us vs. them" mindsets long before 9/11; it was simply the trigger for them now to have a sufficiently distant and foreign "them" on which to focus that thinking.
PG: Well, at least he's smarter than most of the Republican "leadership" in that.
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