Charles Johnson, Ron Paul, Stormfront, and Glenn Greenwald

I've forgotten all about Charles Johnson this last couple of months. He may have peaked with the fawning Los Angeles Times piece a while back, but he was doing some serious damage control on his blog following the surprisingly non-fawning New York Times write up sometime thereafter.

But King Charles is looking for "racists" and "Birchers" as intensely as the likes of Keith Olbermann, and in the case of the latter that interest is mainly a periodic one to keep in good graces with the Daily Kos hate-masters. For Charles Johnson, the search for the ever-elusive key to the alleged GOP/white supremacist connection is all consuming. And because of that, this post (a safe Google link here) is extremely fascinating, "Neo-Nazi Sites Love Ron Paul." Here's the Stromfront quotation from King Charles' post:

Polymath
Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 3,966

Re: Ron Paul Wins CPAC Poll

There is a Jewish Supremacist hate site called “Little Green Footballs” and this kind of thing drives them crazy, because they PRETEND to be conservatives and when a real conservative and all-American man like Dr. Ron Paul wins so many conservative polls, they go crazy with whining.

These LGF Jews are the most unpatriotic Israeli-first traitors the United States sees in the blogosphere. They are vile and disgusting rats. “Charles Johnson” is the shabbat goy that fronts this obvious Zionist hate site, and even if this “Charles Johnson” moron claims to be Christian, he could care less about Christianity in the Holy Land, which is getting wiped out by Zionists, and it fared far better under the Arabs before the Khazar (Ashkenazi) fakes came to the Middle East.

Now reading this, it's extremely perplexing to figure out the lines of ideological affilation or repudiation.

Charles Johnson wants to destroy the tea party movement as an extremist neo-Nazi falange. But this Stormfront guy -- if that's who he really is -- is smearing King Charles with the worst anti-Semitic hatred. Which itself goes to show, frankly, that the tea partiers have absolutely nothing in common with such legitimate hate groups.

It's ridiculous, but that's not all. Glenn Greenwald, the radical leftists who claims to be a constitutional libertarian, has a post up today claiming that the original tea party activists were "Paulbots." See, "The GOP's "Small Government" Tea Party Fraud":

There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.

The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul's son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter "felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy -- a statement met with cheers." Glenn Beck -- who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush's endlessly expanding surveillance state -- now parades around as though he shares the libertarians' contempt for them. Red State's Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative "manifesto," touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws -- from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life state court proceeding -- nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.

A long quote, I know. But the context is needed when reading Greenwald's next passage:

These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of "War on Terror" domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin's own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the "tea party movement" can't possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter's manipulative claim that she "agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy" is laughable; aside from the fact that "foreign policy" is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.

Now you can really see the ideological lines coming back together. Charles Johnson hates the tea parties, and links them to neo-Nazi Ron Paul websites. Glenn Greenwald hates the tea parties BECAUSE he thinks the movement's trying to co-opt Ron Paul. It's amorphous, but I'll tell you: I've been to dozens of tea parties, political rallies, and protests over the last year, and the only place I saw a major Ron Paul (antiwar) contingent was at the communist ANSWER demonstration at the Wilshire Federal Building last October. Indeed, the folks from Antiwar.com were marching, and their organizer, Nick Hankoff, commented at my report.

So folks can now figure out where they'd like to draw up ideological lines: Would you prefer to be associated with the leftist/Ron Paul/Stormfront strange-bedfellows alliance (that in fact includes all of these folks, C.J, Greenwald, and Ron Paul) or with Sarah Palin and the tea parties? For despite Greenwald's long list of indicators suggesting that the tea party movement is going all in for Ron Paul and his protege, it's foreign policy that'll be the dividing line. Ann Coulter said it best, and I noticed this over the weekend: "she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy." Exactly!

And pay special attention to Greenwald's excoriation of the "neocons." Stormfront folks hate the neocons (for their support of Israel). But Sarah Palin's a neoconservative hero, as I've long noted. And that makes it easy to figure which side of the ideological line you'll find me. Genuine conservatives favor a strong national defense, for without security, all of our freedoms here at home are at risk.