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 us“!, since changed to “Pro-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 professor of business at the University of Haifa, on their “Moonbat Central” weblog that shows how the moonbats have taken over the sanitorium:
“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.”
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?
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.
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.
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, where I’m a contributing editor.)
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, and helpfully provides our address. Isn’t that cute?
These guys aren’t the Merry Pranksters — they’re the Scary Paranoids.
Plaut rants on about “Joos” and “conspiracism” — suddenly the Sunday Herald, 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, you see, at least according to the Israeli branch of the Taliban.
Defending Kahanist terrorists, spewing bigoted venom, and telling lies — put a sock in it, Plaut, before you choke on your own bile.