They’ve been predicting that Johnson would make a John Cole-like shift over at Daily Kos for about six months now.  Personally I’m relieved, because an old and dear friend is a conservative and reads LGF, and he’s not a wingnut. 

As for LGF…looks like the right wing is eating its children.  Can’t say that I’m sad, given all the harm they’ve done to the country and the world.

What’s left for Mr. Johnson once he’s disavowed all those groups? What does being a “conservative” mean after that? I’m genuinely curious and think I’ll go read him and find out, if he says.

“...the Goldwater conservatives and moderates have been put six feet under by the theocrats and know-nothings.”

@Felagund

Pam answered your question in the post.

Yeah I’ve actually ended up on LGF at some point recently through a link and couldn’t find any crazy in the post, which was a huge departure from the past (I actually had to check I really was on LGF since I couldn’t believe it).

But…but…but…

LGF has been a home to all those people for years.  What changed?  Besides the host somehow coming to his senses?

It’s like that scene from “Everybody Says I Love You”, where Alan Alda’s family of Democrats has a Alex P. Keaton-like conservative-spewing son…who is discovered to have a brain tumor.  Brain tumor removed…son returns to his senses and drops the conservative nonsense and returns to the liberal fold.

LGF has embraced the hate for so long…what changed?

What changed is the anger after 9/11 became something else.  For some, the anger remains.  For others, it changes into something else.  The anger of 9/11 brought a lot of people together, and not usually in a good way.  There was a desire to make Arabs pay for what happened (hello, Iraq!,) and pay they did.  Sometimes in appropriate ways, but usually in ways that weren’t productive.  Some caught on early, some placed their anger elsewhere (the Truthers weren’t able to let go, but found a new focus,) and some grew out of their anger and sought some sort of realistic response.  Mostly, we all failed to get what was the heart of the matter, since responding appropriately to anger isn’t easy.

This decade is probably going to be known as the Time of America Being Butthurt.  We got attacked in an unfair way, and spent the rest of the decade lashing out at our enemies.  More and more of us are coming to the realization that maybe acting from a position of butthurt isn’t the best way to make the world a better place, but there’s still a long way to go before this realization hits much of the Right (and a good part of the Left as well.)

Ugh, I’m glad he’s come to his senses (I don’t think he’ll identify as a “liberal” but I can at least respect a conservative who isn’t a complete reactionary asswipe), but wasn’t he the guy who made jokes about Rachel Corrie pancakes?

@felagund
There’s plenty of conservatism left, the worthwhile bits just doesn’t have control of the Republican Party.  Seek the people who think Nixon was a better president than Reagan.

The Goldwater Cons were racists.  I love how Goldwater now gets painted as some kind of Eisenhower Republican - he was no such thing.  Just because in his later years he disavowed the religious right takeover of the republican party should not be used to gloss over the fact that the Goldwater movement was racist.

What Might Ponygirl said, Johnson has always been at his bloodthirstiest when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I don’t know if he invented the Rachel Corrie “pizza day” thing or if he just promoted it, but it was definitely a meme he encouraged. If his disavowal of “anti-Islamic bigotry” extends to Palestinian-bashing, then that is indeed news.

(Note also that his specific complaint there is with “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam.” Not sure if it’s just sloppy writing, but the plain reading is that such bigotry that stops short of “support for fascism, violence, and genocide” is perfectly acceptable.)

Afraid I have to agree with you on one point.  The people that Johnson complains about are the Goldwater Republicans.  Goldwater was a fringe right conservative just a step away from the Birchers, but who dressed it up in fancy language.  The modern conservative movement is the bastard stepchild of Goldwater and Nixon midwived by Reagan.

Here’s the odd bit:  the GOP is not noticeably different from what it was, say, five years ago.  Or fifteen, if you wanna talk about Clinton’s cocaine habit and the black UN helicopters.

I mean, it’s nice the guy noticed, but I wonder how fun it would be to pull some five year old posts from him or his co-bloggers and repost them as comments to see how he responds.

I actually know a couple of republicans in the same boat as Johnson. One is my nephew, who works for a republican Texas State Senator in Austin. When we were watching a news report over the holiday about the teabaggers he said “What the fuck is wrong with those people. They keep saying Socialism & Marxism and they don’t even know what it means. Hell, they don’t even know what Republican means.”

Well, they could join the laughable right wing, bank owned, insurance company owned, military/industrial complex owned Democratic party.  As they are pretty much right wing, I really don’t see where there is any problem.

He just needs to change from democratic/republican to republican/democrat. 

Little green footballs has espoused enough nonsense in the past that this is the equivalent of talking to someone who is straight versus someone who has been mainlining crystal meth for a week.

It’s like that scene from “Everybody Says I Love You”, where Alan Alda’s family of Democrats has a Alex P. Keaton-like conservative-spewing son…who is discovered to have a brain tumor.  Brain tumor removed…son returns to his senses and drops the conservative nonsense and returns to the liberal fold.

LGF has embraced the hate for so long…what changed?

Charles Johnson didn’t make LGF a wingnut blog until after 9/11… more specifically, Charles Johnson reacted to 9/11 by becoming a raving wingnut.

By his own admission, he had been more or less apolitical prior to that day, but somehow it affected him in such a manner that it awakened some inner anger, and he jumped on the Muslim-hating bandwagon of the crazy right.  And to be truthful, that was always his main schtick for so long… he didn’t really get into abortion, or fiscal policy, or any number of other conservative pet issues - the so-called “Global War on Terror” is all he ever really cared about.

Anyway, I think much like 9/11 affected him tremendously, the shift towards white supremacy by many of his fellow travellers bothered him immensely as well (he boycotted some wingnut conference in Europe which was going to feature an Austrian neo-Nazi speaker, which is when his fall from grace stared - it began largely as a feud between him and Pamela Gellar of Atlas Shrugged, and spiraled from there).  As he watched what happened throughout the campaign last year, and his fellow wingnuts reactions to the election of our first African-American POTUS, I think it really pushed him over the edge.

He went absolutely ballistic in his postings over the Tea Party events in April and September, making fun of them relentlessly.  He’s also taken on Glenn Beck, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed - Beck called Johnson out personally by name on his television show a few months ago and referred to him as “some idiot blogger”.

This has been coming for a little while now.

More and more of us are coming to the realization that maybe acting from a position of butthurt isn’t the best way to make the world a better place, but there’s still a long way to go before this realization hits much of the Right (and a good part of the Left as well.)

Sad but true.

Which we’ll all get to see evidenced tonight as our 44th President informs us on national television from West Point that he’d like to have a surge of his own, and plans to send 30,000 more troops into an unwinnable war ina mountainous hell.

Love ya, Mr. Obama… but I fear that you may be fucking this one up.

My great-uncle Arthur Larson once wrote a book “Why I Am A Liberal Republican” in the 1950s (here he is discussing the role of ‘intellectuals’ in the Eisenhower White House, before he began his career as an international law professor at Duke). Every iteration of the GOP since has gone further to the right, further to the white, further to the side of ignorance.

As much as I loathe the GOP and wish them nothing but harm, nature abhors a vaccuum, and too many Democrats are rushing to fill the center-right void, reducing the number of functioning political parties in America from 2.0 to somewhere around 1.2

Here’s the odd bit:  the GOP is not noticeably different from what it was, say, five years ago.  Or fifteen, if you wanna talk about Clinton’s cocaine habit and the black UN helicopters.

I mean, it’s nice the guy noticed . .

It’s one thing to ignore 17 years of stupid & insane against the Democrats; but to wake up and realize that it’s your own wing of the party its now being used on, now it’s bad?

I like what Charles posted.  But he’s got another 20 years of emotional growth left to go before he’s no longer an apologetic asshole.

it was up to 1346 comments, which I wont look at while at work.  Somehow I ended up in the wrong comments, probably due to being at work & multitasking in the panda. 

For those who watch Scifi, my family has taken to refering to this decade as the USA being the Membari and all going mad together.  Some of us just came to our senses sooner; some much sooner and some still not even close yet.  God, the 1st season, maybe 2, of that show was great.

helen w. h.: does that make us the worker caste?

Note also that his specific complaint there is with “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam.”

LGF was doing that for years, too.

It’s one thing to criticise radical Islam, or indeed any religious sect that uses a “mandate of heaven” to institutionalise sexism and homobigotry—as a liberal athiest I no problem with that. But LGF brought a counter-productive Hitchens-style absolutism to the issue, giving zero credit to those Muslims who are trying to reform their religion into a more personal and inclusive mould.

It’s a separate thing to criticise the dysfunctional and seemingly intractable culture of tribal despotism and priests that plagues the Middle East—again, no problem with that, as long as you include Jewish fundies and their Xtian fantasist allies in the mix. LGF, however, tended to turn a blind eye to the Orthodox settlers who are a major hurdle to any sort of solution, be it one- or two-state.

But even more than that, LGF had a tendency to sink into anti-Arab racism—indulging in the classic fallacy that Arabs were genetically pre-disposed toward the problematic religion and culture described above.

I guess anyone can change, and perhaps he saw the ascendency of those conservatives (Buchanan, Palin, Huckabee, Beck, Limbaugh, etc, etc) who pander to bigoted Know-Nothings and remembered that a nasty purge of “impure” fellow-travellers is always the first order of business when an extremist faction consolidates power. Which is good self-interested foresight, but which doesn’t make this a shift to liberalism by a longshot.

tonight as our 44th President informs us on national television from West Point that he’d like to have a surge of his own, and plans to send 30,000 more troops into an unwinnable war ina mountainous hell.

Love ya, Mr. Obama… but I fear that you may be fucking this one up.

I don’t fear, I know. 30,000 more American servicepeople to prop up a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent (albeit cultured) tribal warlord against a bunch of violent religious fantasists (who are being enabled, if not outright supported, by a powerful political faction of our “ally,” Pakistan).

As someone put it the other day on a podcast, in Afghanistan we’re fighting a 14th-century adversary with an 18th-century strategy. A shameful thing indeed for 21st-century Americans to be doing.

I blame the electrification of the south.  Now the crazy, ignorant bigots that used to be safely isolated in the back woods can now blog-forth and infect their crazy on the legislature like never before.

Of course it also allows us to expose those Macacca moments where the pols head to the back woods to stir the racists up for the base vote.

LGF is the biggot in the office that seems mostly reasonable until “the brown people step out of line.”

LGF is the biggot in the office that seems mostly reasonable until “the brown people step out of line.”

I suspect that a lot of his readers are politically conservative Jews, and he feels obliged to let them know that your average American Know-Nothing—their long-standing “allies”—can be just as anti-semitic as your average Palestinian Hamas fan. But you’re correct: that doesn’t mean that he holds Arabs in any higher esteem than he did before, although he seems to be dumping the racism explicitly here.

I welcome it as a sign that at least some of the right is stepping back from the edge of the cliff.  You can’t have a debate with someone who is completely irrational.  If any significant chunk of the Republican party comes back to a point where we can at least talk about issues and work towards real consensus solutions, that can only be a good thing for the country.  As long as the discourse is dominated by people whose political philosophy is naked rage and hatred for anybody who’s not a straight white male fundamentalist xtian (including, somehow, a large number of people who have so internalized the bigotry that they embrace it despite being in the ‘not worthy’ category themselves), there’s really no chance of effective governance.

As long as the discourse is dominated by people whose political philosophy is naked rage and hatred for anybody who’s not a straight white male fundamentalist xtian (including, somehow, a large number of people who have so internalized the bigotry that they embrace it despite being in the ‘not worthy’ category themselves)

See: Horowitz, David; Goldberg, Jonah

What struck me was that the first few dozen comments (out of 1,300+) were mostly supportive. I expected Johnson to get flamed mercilessly.

I suspect that a lot of his readers are politically conservative Jews, and he feels obliged to let them know that your average American Know-Nothing—their long-standing “allies”—can be just as anti-semitic as your average Palestinian Hamas fan.

Interestingly, Charles Johnson’s whole shift began largely because of a feud he got into with Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugged.  When he began calling her out directly on his blog, Johnson became persona non grata among the Freepers.

The irony is that Johnson is not a Jew, but has taken to calling out the naked bigotry of the teabaggers; Geller, who is Jewish, still embraces those folks as “her people”.  But then again, as one of the nation’s most prominent Birthers, Alan Keyes doesn’t seem to have a problem sharing political beliefs with KKK members, either.  Were it not for Keyes, we may have never heard of Orly Taitz - she launched her public persona by representing Keyes in one of the original Birther lawuits.

The bigger irony is that Johnson and Geller used to be strong allies and personal friends - they attended many wingnut conferences together.  Today, they despise each other, and frequently rip the other one apart on their respective blogs.

So, over the last few years, I count three prominent Righties seeing the light: Charles Johnson, John Cole and (on a good day) Andrew Sullivan.  Going the other way:  Dennis Miller.

It’s a trade I’m comfortable with.

What struck me was that the first few dozen comments (out of 1,300+) were mostly supportive. I expected Johnson to get flamed mercilessly.

Those who would have flamed him stopped reading and commenting on his blog many months ago.

There’s actually a decent number of Daily Kos members who have become regular commenters at LGF - you can tell by some of the user names.

A lot of center-right Democrats have found a home at LGF in recent months.

The Goldwater Cons were racists.  I love how Goldwater now gets painted as some kind of Eisenhower Republican - he was no such thing.  Just because in his later years he disavowed the religious right takeover of the republican party should not be used to gloss over the fact that the Goldwater movement was racist.

Hall of Fame baseball player Jackie Robinson wrote in his book that the 1964 Republican National Convention (at which he was an honored guest) felt to him how he imagined Hitler’s Germany must have felt to a Jew in the 1930s.  Robinson wasn’t a Republican (he was an independent), but he had supported and campaigned for Republicans before 1964, including Richard Nixon in 1960.  This, of course, was back in the day when there were a fairly decent number of black Republicans in America, when the Democratic Party still harbored a large number of racist Southern Dems.

Eisenhower was probably the last decent Republican POTUS we’ve had.  Gerald Ford wasn’t a complete wingnut, but he wasn’t particularly notable, either.

As much as its fans exalt his ghost, were Ronald Reagan to look in on today’s incarnation of the GOP I wager he’d be horrified.

Traditional American conservatism is all but dead, soured by neo-cons, hacks, and know-nothing talking heads as the lot continues to propel their caravan over Mr. Johnson’s aforementioned cliff. If this trend continues, Karl Rove’s (demented) dream of a permanent GOP majority may reach its polar opposite in the near-future.

Given that all of these things were in evidence 5 or more years ago, I think the only important part of the statement is “I won’t be going over the cliff with them.” He’s decided that the current wingnut movement is losing, and he doesn’t want to be a loser.

Of course, this is a step up from the average wingnut, who thinks that the electoral and cultural losses of the past few years mean that they just have to be even more mean-spirited, bigoted and intolerant.

Well, I’d only been over there a few times following links, and the comments there had been so bad I wouldn’t return.  Same with Freeperland…just a sick hatred that’s important to know exists, but not necessary to wade into.

Of course, by disavowing the racists, he’s no longer allowed to be a conservative.  He’s a MarxistSocialistIslamoFascist just like the rest of us, regardless of any particular policy position.

DTG @ 31:

>>Eisenhower was probably the last decent Republican POTUS we’ve had.  Gerald Ford wasn’t a complete wingnut, but he wasn’t particularly notable, either.

Agreed on Ike and Ford, both of whom are among my favorite Republicans. But unfortunately, were both alive and active in today’s GOP they’d have been long since negated by now. The party has largely become an old timey revival tent in which infidels are cast out, and the lot clings to a handful of core beliefs in the fierce conviction that God is on their side - this, despite the fact that the tent they’re huddling beneath is on fire.

He’s a douche. He was a douche before 9/11, he was a douche on 9/11, and he’s a douche today.

Finding out that he’s switching to my team doesn’t make me go ‘yay’, it makes me wonder if there’s something terribly wrong with my team that he would want to join. (Reviews team…no, we’re basically OK.)

But he’s still a douche.

I doubt Eisenhower was conservative enough to get the Democratic nomination for President in today’s America.

Ab_Normal,
Me, certainly; the majority for us as for the Minbari (as Delenn said in a mid-run episode) are worker class, and we get screwed by the warior and priethood classes.  I can’t speak for you, of course.

I choose to see this as a positive. If the folks at LGF is starting to think that the conservatives are going batshit, just imagine what normal people are thinking…

I’m certainly not going to embrace Charles Johnson until he’s done enough good to balance out the harm we already know he’s done, but being that my own brother went fascist I really can’t bring myself to thinking that there’s no going back ever from the dark side, no matter how foolish that might seem to other people.

For the record, this is how persuasion works in a general sense—people suddenly switch opinions for reasons which are totally incomprehensible to anyone outside their immediate sphere.  This is why engagement should not be predicated on a sense of “winning” any particular encounter, but rather on successfully and confidently conveying the existence of a worldview and its supporting ideas.

Other posters have made this point, but it can’t be said enough: Goldwater was not a “respectable” conservative. He was a racist, or at best an apologist and enabler for racism. If black citizens of the United States were unable to use public accommodations or register to vote, well, that was just fine and dandy with him.

There’s a disturbing tendency among progressives to view conservatives from past generations through rose-colored glasses. To hell with Taft, Goldwater, Buckley and the rest of them.

That Larson interview is remarkable. It’s impossible to imagine that conversation taking place on TV today, and that’s a real tragedy, because when we can’t have those kinds of interviews, something very meaningful has been lost.

Bah, more hype and bluster from a person who is nothing but the aforementioned.

I guess the world’s longest meltdown is officially over.

(Note the date that was posted, BTW)

You know what’s the most bittersweet part of all of this?

While we should be able to observe the lunacy going on in the GOP and believe that we’re on the verge of burying them for good, that looks to be far from the case next year.

According to a Research 2000/DailyKos poll released this week, 81% of Republicans say they are very likely to vote in 2010, whereas only 56% of Democrats say the same.

If those numbers play out at the polls, we’re going to lose Congress in eleven months.

As it stands right now, very few poll analysts think the Democrats will gain any ground next year, and the question isn’t whether or not the Republicans will pick up seats (it appears that they almost definitely will), but just how many they will pick up?

In a strange way, this makes a lot of sense… as batshit crazy as the GOPers have been, the Democrats have been giving their base an enormous amount of heartburn since the big takeover last year.  HCR will get passed, but it’s going to be quite watered down from what many had hoped for last year when we went to the polls.  We’re intensifying our engagement in one of the two wars that we are still engaged in… a lot of Democratic base feels really frustrated with how this year has turned out, given what many expected when we won back the White House and huge Congressional majorities.

I do think the hardcore wingnut ideology is dying, but unfortunately, I think it’s gonna get a jolt of life in November 2011… simple demographics are eventually going to work in our favor (the most staunch wingnuts are gonna die before we do), but I fear that next year is going to give them a small resurgence in the short term.

I just checked LGF’s entries for the last few days and it seems like Charles has really seen the light - there’s no obvious islamophobia to be found and he mostly spends his time attacking islamophobe nuts, AGW deniers, creationists and others. Considering this, I really don’t see why so many commentators have decided to attack him. Sure, he’s said stupid shit about Rachel Corrie and other people. It’s not like the right has a monopoly on mocking dead people.

Many of the comments on this entry sure seem like they’d encourage other right-wingers to rethink their allegiance. Not.

LGF has always tried to damp down on the Islamophobia - he has used language censors to block or edit the worst of the comments.

But it wasn’t until this year that the Islamophobes actually felt unwelcome there.

”While we should be able to observe the lunacy going on in the GOP and believe that we’re on the verge of burying them for good, that looks to be far from the case next year.
According to a Research 2000/DailyKos poll released this week, 81% of Republicans say they are very likely to vote in 2010, whereas only 56% of Democrats say the same.
If those numbers play out at the polls, we’re going to lose Congress in eleven months. “

While I tend to agree with this, on my more optimistic days I can see the other side –
Most people don’t vote FOR someone, they vote AGAINST the other guy
LBJ wasn’t exactly Mr Charisma, and Goldwater had his “Goldwater Girls” and “Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes” knocking on doors to tell us that “In your heart, you know he’s right”
But in our guts we knew he was nuts so LBJ won in a landslide

Yeah, mid-terms aren’t the same as Presidential elections, but the right will try to nationalize the campaign, and outside of the south I don’t see the right growing
And if the enthusiasm of the Palin-Beck-Club for Growth teabag crowd failed in upstate NY in an odd numbered year I don’t see why it would be much different in 2010

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