That explains why Gruber’s response seemed perhaps overly-defensive at DF this week. To allow comments or to not allow comments is one of the oldest in the blogosphere, one going all the way back to the first half of the last decade, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the issue raised in any kind of prominent way. Certainly I have not seen it since the rise of social media in the second half of the last decade, prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.

Quoting at some length, here’s Gruber reply:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

The “it’s not a blog without comments” argument is one that was once frequently lobbed at righty bloggers, such as Instapundit’s one man band, Glenn Reynolds, from lefty bloggers on community, or “diary” sites such as Daily Kos and MyDD. In January 2006, when I was writing The Blogometer for The Hotline at National Journal, I offered some unsolicited commentary on the subject:

This certainly isn’t the case for all or perhaps even most right-leaning blogs, but there’s more than a strain of truth to this. Liberal blogs are on the whole more likely to enable comment boards than conservative blogs. … Liberal blog readers expect that a blogger make space available on their site to facilitate discussion, whereas conservative argue that anyone can start a blog and it’s not the responsibility of the blogger to give others a soapbox. It’s their soapbox, of course. The difference here is one of conservatives touting the virtue of ownership and individual initiative vs. liberals expressing a desire for community.

As lefty blog analyst Chris Bowers has observed, that there are more conservative blogs in the upper tiers, although the liberal blogs have in that range attract more overall traffic. Though there are doubtless multiple factors, one reason is because many liberals have gravitated toward these community sites. All those diaries on Daily Kos are people who otherwise might have signed up for a Blogger account and struck out on their own in the blogosphere.

So the online left and the online right tend to have slightly different ideas about what a blog is for, and on this point they’re talking past each other.

This is a little ironic, considering that Gruber’s political politics (as opposed to tech politics) are clearly left-liberal, as anyone who reads his site with some regularity has surely noticed. (Though he is surely an “Appublican” in the phrase of one clever comment, speaking of irony, here.) (And did I mention that The Blogometer was recently retired? For another discussion.)

Interestingly, Wilcox has now rescinded his previous challenge, and taken up Gruber’s not-actually-implied one, as he wrote (on his own blog, of course) in response afterward:

I argued that comments add to the narrative. Fine, I’ll try it John’s way. Most Oddly Together comments are missing anyway, following a blog transition that broke the links … As an experiment, as of today, I’ve removed the Disqus commenting system from this blog for two weeks. If I decide to permanently turn off comments, I’ll write a mea culpa post and apology to John Gruber.

So the game is afoot, though I think Wilcox will prefer his own blogging style, and Gruber will probably give at most five words to it.

Meanwhile, fellow thinking Apple supporter MG Siegler has weighed in to say his views on comments have changed over the years, and he no longer has them on his personal site:

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse.

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

It may seem like everyone has a blog, but that isn’t truly the case. What is one to do? CK Sample III concludes in a post on his own blog:

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter.

I think that’s the right conclusion. Blog P.I. does have comments, but the only reason it still does at this late date is because I haven’t taken the time to close them (you may note that I haven’t taken the time to do much writing at Blog P.I. lately, either). When this site launched in 2006 and through the next couple years as I wrote alongside a couple of talented co-bloggers, this site did begin to develop a small commenting community (including Jim Treacher, now of Daily Caller fame).

But then two things happened: The first has to do with social networking: In late 2006 I joined Facebook and early 2007 I joined Twitter, and most everyone who writes about technology and politics did so about the same time or not long after. With only anecdotal and in absolutely no way empirical basis for the claim, I would say this happened to many other bloggers, those writing about technology and politics and those writing about other subjects. In fact, a general decline in blogging has been the subject of some discussion in recent years. I can’t say that I have seen that, but I also can’t say that claim is based in empiricism, either.

A second effect is probably much more specific to this site: in 2007 I started writing about comment spam, political comment spam, Twitter spam and even political Twitter spam. Guess what happens when you start writing about spam? That’s right: you become a target of spam. I had to rachet the controls on my spam filters up so high it began to block legitimate commenters, Treacher included.

Will I turn off comments here? Not unless I return to blogging here on a more regular-type basis, and I don’t have any immediate plans to do that. Let’s say I do pick up the pace at Blog P.I., how would I like to incorporate feedback? The answer, I think, is some combination of integration with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Open Graph (and before it Facebook Connect) is the most attractive option, provided I can find someone to plug it in at a reasonable price. In this way, people can comment on this site while friends of that individual may see the fact of their comment here back on Facebook. Twitter does not yet support such a service, but they’re working on one, and as Twitter tends to be more germane to political communications (at least among those I follow) I definitely want relevant tweets here.

John Gruber may not want that, and that’s fine. His soapbox is indeed far bigger than mine, so he needs to think about managing his online presence whereas I would still be trying to promote mine (if I was actually doing that). There are probably many today who would still insist he is not writing a blog. That’s a matter of perspective, which says more about the wide range of opinion about what blogging is good for and supposed to be about. Some might even say that my own dearth of posts in 2010 has rendered it “not a weblog.” To which I would probably say: OK, then it’s not a blog. It’s still social media, albeit a relatively primitive form. Blog P.I. was state-of-the-art in 2006 but is behind the times today. (MyBlogLog in the sidebar, anyone?) I’d like to fix that, and maybe someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about politics and technology on Facebook and Twitter.

But what interests me even more is the intellectual framework writer Jonathan Dee imposes on the proceedings. While there certainly appears to be a personal element involved for Johnson — one Dee apparently wasn’t quite able to crack — there is also the possibility that events occurred as they did because the Internet elevates the importance of links and the act of linking, opening the possibility for the forging of novel (and possibly false) relationships. On the Internet, the possibility of creating new contexts is limited only by any one person’s imagination. It’s impossible for me to say whether this is true in Johnson’s case, but Dee at least presents a persuasive case.

Key excerpts:

Whatever you think of him, Johnson is a smart man, a gifted synthesizer of information gathered by other people. But just as for anyone in his position, there is an inevitable limit to what he can learn about places, people, political organizations, etc., without actually encountering them. Instead of causes and effects, motivations and consequences, observation and behavior, his means of intellectual synthesis is, instead, the link: the indiscriminate connection established via search engine. …

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997.

Fans of Don DeLillo may recall the final pages of his 1997 novel “Underworld” (no relation to the graphic novels, film series nor English techno artists) where the characters Sister Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover are joined for eternity in cyberspace, “a single fluctuating impulse now, a piece of coded information. Everything is connected in the end.” Well, I did, anyway.

Meanwhile, Dee makes a secondary point that this blurring of context may contribute to a conflation of conflicting perceptions which one may find too often in online discourse:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind. …

The soundest conclusion seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

I cannot say that is what is happening here — I’m certainly not about to be pulled into a discussion of Vlaams Belang. And while misreadings of intentions are not new to online discourse, I think there is a “flattening effect” or, to borrow a metaphor from television, “time-shifting” of opinion which can sometimes confuse more than enlighten. Such confusion may be innocent, but it is also open to exploitation. With no information online separated by more than a few clicks, anyone can choose their own context. And in the blogosphere, some choose contexts incompatible with others’ — even if only for the sake of argument.

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

What had Yglesias written to deserve this treatment? Two days prior, this:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.

It shouldn’t take long to figure out what the reaction would be. And it took only three minutes for the first comment, by “The CAP Cleaning Staff”, to appear:

Maybe it’s just me, but this post is kind of creepy.

Around the blogosphere, reactions have been much the same. Lefty bloggers from the netroots and academia, such as Matt Stoller and Brad DeLong, rallied to his side. Markos Moulitsas, who has a few more institutional relationships than most, was somewhat muted in his response, the first line simply being:

The Center for American Progress should not make a habit of doing this.

And I concur. The post was, as Yglesias friend Julian Sanchez put it, profoundly tone deaf. It makes CAP look less like a think tank and more like a message machine (something that is true of most DC research institutions, but few let their guard slip so badly) and it will bring yet more scrutiny to Third Way [Update: About which, great comparison here].

Yet this is also exactly the way of things, as James Joyner matter-of-factly explans:

CAP employs Matt to write a blog for them and, contrary to the views of some commenters, it’s absurd to expect that they should simply let him post whatever he feels like posting. Institutions start blogs with the purpose of advancing their institutional agenda. Writing for CAP is different from writing for a general interest magazine or on one’s own space, both of which Matt did previously.

What’s more, left-leaning but independent-minded Brendan Nyhan had already imagined just this scenario, and does not believe this will be an isolated incident:

There’s no way that this sort of reaction won’t create a chilling effect on Yglesias. How could he not think twice about criticizing Third Way or other CAP partners in the future? It’s the reason we need smart bloggers like him at independent outlets like The Atlantic that won’t enforce a party line.

It’s already having an effect on his comment section. To be sure, Yglesias’ commenters have been irritatingly wry and weirdly intelligent for years, but in response to this throwaway joke post this morning…

Deep Thought

The fact that the weather has swung rapidly from unseasonably warm to incredibly cold conclusively debunks concerns about man-made climate change.

…this was the first comment:

Now we know Jennifer Palmieri’s views on the weather. Also Third Way’s official opinions.

Just remember, Matt Yglesias is no longer writing on this blog. It’s been hijacked by Palmieri, CEO of Center for American Progress. Sad, that.

This is really sad.

I don’t think I’d go that far. But it is a reminder that the blogosphere is still subject to constraints from the outside world.

The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

Four years later, some on the left are doing the exact same thing to John McCain. The Politico has already taken note of two in particular. One is Gen. Wesley Clark, who is likely to get some major press coverage. Less likely to generate interest offline, but still likely to be influential, is this John Aravosis post:

Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?

It’s not “nice” to ask the question, but it’s actually a pretty good question. … A lot of people don’t know, however, that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity. Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain’s military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief? It’s not like McCain rose to the level of general or something. He’s a vet. We get it. But simply being a vet, as laudable as it is, doesn’t really tell you much about someone’s qualifications for being commander in chief.

One might think that Aravosis would think twice about taking this line of attack, considering his support for John Kerry in 2004. On the other hand, AMERICAblog spent most of that year trying to make President Bush sound like a deserter. And in fact, Aravosis has been pushing this McCain-is-not-a-war-hero line for awhile.

But let’s answer the points Aravosis avoids: McCain spent more than a half-decade as a prisoner of war. Significantly, he refused an offer of early release in 1968, remaining behind with his fellow POWs and denying the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory (McCain’s father was a four-star admiral leading the U.S. Pacific Command).

Meanwhile, Aravosis portrays John McCain as participating in a propaganda video as if McCain did so of his own volition, rather than being held captive. To the contrary, McCain often made trouble for his captors — cheering the bombing of the North with his fellow soldiers — and spent significant time in solitary confinement. I don’t refer people to Wikipedia as a matter of course, but these sections are very well-supported, and the bibliography is a credible one.

Meanwhile, based on the comments to Aravosis’ post, it sounds like McCain’s critics are likely to try pinning the 1967 USS Forrestal disaster on him as well. Oh, and there’s this lovely comment:

HOW ABOUT A LITTLE WATERBOARDING FOR THIS CLOWN

Meanwhile, Aravosis’ 2004 candidate was “merely a vet” who spent just four months in combat, gave time to slanders against his fellow soldiers and whose convictions on the Iraq war developed late, at best. But I don’t want to argue about John Kerry; that may be the point. In fact, Barack Obama’s lack of a military record is an unlikely plus: he grew up at a time when military service was neither obligated nor obligatory.

Aravosis’ post by itself is deliberately inflammatory and poorly reasoned. Alone, it wouldn’t demand a response. But with liberal 527s outspending their conservative counterparts, it will be very interesting to see how far Obama supporters pursue this line of attack in the coming weeks and months.

Regrettably, I was born with no mouth.

He was very understanding, writing back the next day:

thank you sir thank for your mail all is understood well i can question you just of the condition you gave any please kindly make a way we can both talk

At least I think he understood. In any case, this is the long way around getting to my real point.

As you may know, I run a blog here. As you can probably guess, I get my share of spam comments; most are caught by the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. But then, most are fully automated and advertise prescription drugs, gambling websites or sex acts that would probably boost my unique visitor counts if I mentioned them, but I don’t need that kind of traffic.

However, a small percentage of it manages to evade Akismet’s filters and find its way into my moderation queue. In some cases, they are only barely distinguishable from real comments. In some cases not listed here, I’ve approved comments that I am sure were intended only to improve the SEO of the website linked, but were interesting enough to allow through on their own merits.

Most are not, but this doesn’t mean they’re entirely without value. Some of them are clever, some are just amusing. I’ve been holding onto a few of them to discuss here, so let’s open up the queue, if for no other reason than now I can finally delete them:

Here, somebody is pushing what appears to be a YouTube clone, even using a joking nickname YouTube acquired once the site itself was acquired by Google. In fact, the site turns out to be a combination of Google’s input forms. Though the IP address indeed traces back to the United Kingdom, the author is not especially concerned with proper English spelling or punctuation. They also have no system for keeping track of which websites they have already hit, or they just don’t care. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Here is one that, at first glance, looks like a genuine comment: This was intended for a post that mentioned Ron Paul, just as the one above tried attaching itself to a post discussing Google and YouTube. But if you follow the link, it goes to a blog whose posts consist of only of one YouTube video and sometimes-relevant text copied from other websites — “scraped” as it’s called. And there’s a good reason why it sounds like a real comment: It was scraped from another comment from the same thread.

This one promotes yet another inscrutable blog, this time in a foreign language that I presume to be Turkish. I guess this because the IP address resolves to Izmir, Turkey. The one above resolves to Istanbul, Turkey. The two cities are not close by, so they are probably not the same person. But if Turkey is a hotbed of comment spam, that’s news to me.

Undoubtedly, this one is my favorite. Like the Wikipedia vandal whose edit summary consisted of “Blanked the page” or the panhandler who admits he needs the money for booze, “Sohbet” is admirably honest about his intentions. I might even consider throwing him a link, except that the website no longer exists — less than a month after he was trying to extract Google juice/build traffic for it. Also of note: the IP address resolves to Antalya, Turkey. Still, if Turkish comment spam is a known phenomenon, I can’t find any discussion about it.

Funny at first, but tedious. I get a lot of these, and it’s kind of similar to another common tactic I’ll get to in just a bit. Flattery will get you everywhere with some people, but not me. Also, the linked site is in Russian. Russian spam at least I am familiar with.

Better than YouTube! Quite a claim. Surprisingly, the website is well-designed, coherent and legitimate. For someone who just wanted to find videos related to a presidential or prospective VP candidate, it might actually be better than YouTube. So here we can start to draw a clear distinction: Some spam comment campaigns aim to promote fake websites that seek ad revenue or to promote another website. Others are spammy promotions for real websites; it’s very possible the creators of this website don’t know exactly what their SEO is up to. But I’m not particularly offended by this comment. It doesn’t add to the conversation so I won’t approve it, but it got the general subject matter of this website correct, it’s vaguely conversational, and it doesn’t represent itself as anything other than what it is: a pitch.

Lastly, this one I’m including not because it’s compelling, but because it’s so common. Also, because it represents the dishonest counterpoint to the previous example. Here, the commenter announces enthusiasm for the targeted website (in this case mine), then immediately starts pitching another website. Notice that his subject matter is completely off-base with what Blog P.I. is about. The targeted post — which I wrote in July, 2006 — included exactly one use of the word “wedding,” in a throwaway reference to New York Times announcements page thereof.

Predictably, the website being promoted is commercial in nature, but doesn’t offer anything for sale itself. What it does, though, is link to pages on a real wedding supply website, which presumably hired the spammer to boost their search engine ranking. A bit of rudimentary sleuthing reveals the SEO’s identity and company; he’s using his real name (which is something, I guess) and he didn’t even register the URL anonymously.

But I’m not going to single him out with a link or textual mention that could turn up in a search engine. He’s not doing anything illegal and, as noted above, similar practices are exceedingly common. I’ve been a critic of certain SEO practices, but I’m fascinated by also them, and clearly I think some tactics are better than others. The way I see it, if you’re going to do black hat SEO, why not do it with some style?

Also, the joke is on them: Every link in my comment section is automatically assigned a nofollow attribute.

Matt Stoller, on Edwards’ departure from the race:

It’s entirely unclear who the Edwards voters are going to turn to, but we do know that Clinton picked up no activist support in the blogosphere. Obama has fully consolidated the netroots, from last month when there was a split with Edwards. I expect to see internal pressure from heavily creative class dominated institutions who emerged from 1998-2006 to move into Obama’s camp.

To paraphrase Dan Akroyd: Stoller, you ignorant slut. Or at least, you misreader of Internet polls. While dKos straw polls have consistently shown big leads for Edwards and Obama, with shifts to Dodd and Richardson, the full survey results of MoveOn.org — a measure the netroots once used to figure out what blog readers looked like — was always very different, showing stronger support for Clinton and Kucinich, but not Dodd and Richardson.

Stoller of all people should know, you can’t use a straw poll on one blog to claim the collective wisdom of the netroots. And it’s become all but tradition for the first comment on a Stoller post to call him out:

What does this mean?

“heavily creative class dominated institutions who emerged from 1998-2006 to move into Obama’s camp.

Sheesh, can you be more obtuse? Also, re-read your post. There was no split with Edwards, better re-write to be clear. That doesn’t mean Obama has “consolidated” the netroots at all. Let’s see what Edwards does re. an endorsement. Right now, he’s seeing how the two move forward on his issues. Clinton is better on health care than Obama, frankly.

This is hardly worth posting unless you are going to make a clear argument that we can discuss.

Epic fail.

Update: Yep. Hillary Clinton got nearly 30% support in MoveOn’s head-to-head poll, and just 11% from Daily Kos. They both favor Obama, but their memberships have different mindsets.

tP guest blogger Garrett M. Graff (the first blogger to get officially credentialed to cover the White House, by the way) argues that,

That’s enough, turn them back on.

I’m not surprised tP’s Micah Sifry believes that Graff was the first blogger credentialed to attend briefings at the White House. After all, Graff announced at the time that he’d been approved, got leading lights of the political and tech blogospheres to help write the legend, and subsequently proclaimed himself a figure of historical interest. Today, it’s the first thing he mentions in his speakers bureau listing.

It’s a good line. I can see why he ran with it.

The problem is, Graff was not the first accredited blogger at the White House. I know this because the real first blogger is my good friend and former colleague Eric Pfeiffer, then employed as a blogger by National Review Online. Pfeiffer sought and obtained credentials to cover the White House press briefings, and on March 1 he covered that morning’s gaggle with Scott McClellan in a post appropriately titled “Notes from the Gaggle.” Graff’s credentials weren’t approved until three days later.

This isn’t the first time I’ve brought this up — in fact, at the time I pointed it out to WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin, who followed up in a column some weeks later:

It has come to my attention that Garrett M. Graff, the much-celebrated “first blogger in the White House,” was, technically speaking, the “second blogger in the White House.” …

Eric Pfeiffer, who writes the Beltway Buzz blog for National Review Online, blogged from the briefing room on March 1 … almost a full week before Graff made it in.

Pfeiffer just didn’t make a big deal out of it.

That’s true enough — squeaky wheels get the grease, and self-promoters get the column inches. Yet others called foul at the time, arguing that professional status and a corporate-designed website disqualified one from being “a blogger”:

The “blogger” is Garrett M. Graff, a 23-year-old employee of a company called Mediabistro.com. His official title is “editor.” The “blog” is FishbowlDC, a site decorated with all the little corporate features sites like Yahoo have. A contact email address which doesn’t go to the “blogger.” A disclaimer. A copyright notice. A site map.

The “blog” has no comments, and there are no trackbacks.

Froomkin also tried to draw a distinction between Pfeiffer working for a magazine vs. Graff working for a media site. I’m not sure I go in for these careful distinctions. They did the same kind of work for websites more alike than different, neither of which allowed for comments. So it makes for an interesting debate, but not too interesting, because that “credentialed” condition actually matters — neither were the first to report from the White House in blog format.

That distinction goes to non-journalist and non-Washingtonian Rex Hammock, a veteran of the technology and business blogosphere, who wrote about a private meeting with President Bush in February 2004 — more than a year before Pfeiffer (and was also covered by Froomkin). He wasn’t credentialed, but obviously some would say that qualifies him all the more.

I have no illusions that this post will retire the myth of Garrett Graff as the first blogger credentialed to the White House; it’s been repeated too many times in too many outlets in the past two years. I don’t know him personally and don’t wish him a lot of trouble over this. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair to keep crediting him with a milestone he didn’t reach first.

I promised then to look a little closer at the identity of this dedicated anti-Fredhead, and while I later thought I had thought the better of it, Christopher Caldwell’s piece in the most recent New York Times Magazine afforded me the opportunity to re-rethink that decision.

And so this post exists… in three interminable parts. I don’t often use the below-the-fold feature on WordPress, but this post won’t appeal to everyone, and I don’t want it to get in everyone’s way. But if you’re game, then follow me…

I. Lucky Jim

Let’s start at the beginning. The post mentioned above dared The Artist Sometimes Known as Jim Robinson to post on this site, and to his credit (I suppose) he did:

Jim Robinson
Jul 11th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

Y’all (thats “you all” dumbed down for FRaudheads) flatter me. I guess if Fred actually had credentials you wouldnt be sitting here worrying about what Im posting on blogs.

DOH!
Posted Jul 11, 2:14 PM

I went on vacation a few days later, and apparently “Jim” missed the flattery enough to come back and beg for some more:

RepublicanWomenAgainstFredThompson
Jul 20th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

I thought y’all were gonna do something about me???? What happened? ROFLAMO! losers.

Taunted into submission, eventually I decided to go ahead and see where his IP address was located:

The IP address traces to Bell, California, a nothing city located in Los Angeles County. According to Wikipedia, its most famous native is bandleader Stan Kenton, and was last heard from in 2000, when USPS misplaced some Oscar statuettes and this was inaccurately reported as a stolen shipment. For what it’s worth, this IP address is the same one supplied to me by another blogger hit with similar absurdities from our friend “Jim.”

Next I tried contacting the person at the Yahoo address listed for multiple handles, s1nderella@yahoo.com. I was even going to offer an e-mail interview, if he or she was so willing. Alas, it bounced back immediately.

So I Googled s1nderella, which seems to be a named used by a handful of young female social networkers. I suppose this could lend credence to the idea our “Jim Robinson” is actually a woman in drag. Or maybe not. Perhaps our political prankster is just a little more planned-ahead than usual, and is reasonably sure the IP address will not connect him to his or her job, nor any candidate.

And that’s just as well. It’s not as if these attacks are having any impact besides annoying the Fredheads (I’m sure some will read the very existence of this post as evidence that Fred supporters are “afraid” of such attacks, but I’ll just point again to the title and mission statement of this blog). Meanwhile, “Jim” had struck again (and probably again and again), even getting called out at Sean Hackbarth’s site, where a contributor linked back to my original post.

II. Basil the Great

So “Jim Robinson” continues to hide in plain sight. But what is his agenda, if he has one beyond making a scene? Let’s now look at his actual words. Here’s one of the more peculiar (not to mention widely-distributed) phrases from his oeurve:

One right-wing critic in a widely circulated internet column called Thompson a “neocon globalist” for his immigration, free trade, and foreign policy positions.

I joked at the time that the source must have been left unidentified because he was so obscure as to induce, at best, confusion. Seems I was more right than I knew. The “right-wing critic” appears to be someone named Basil Harrington, who sometimes describes himself as “a retired businessman, poet, and resident of Chapel Hill, North Carolina” and sometimes merely as “a scholar, writer and gentleman.”

Mr. Harrington appears to be nobody of any repute, and if he wrote anything prior to March of this year, it’s not easy to find. He is considered a self-promoting crackpot at Free Republic, a website that knows from self-promoting crackpots. In fact, it appears that Mr. Harrington’s limited output as an essayist has been posted to just about any website accepting unpaid conservative commentary: at Liberty Post, Men’s News Daily, Enter Stage Right, ChronWatch, SmallGovTimes (which claims Bill Frist, Dick Morris and others as contributors (i.e. it has copied their words from the Senate floor and The Hill)), and NewsBull to list a few. He is “widely-circulated” all right — apparently all by himself.

NewsBull is (at least one) home to the rant that inspired “Jim Robinson.” It begins:

Fred Thompson: Neocon Globalist

By Basil Harrington

For the past few days movement “conservatives” and GOP cheerleaders have been ecstatic that Fred Thompson, former Senator from Tennessee, may form an exploratory committee to seek the GOP nomination for president. “Now we’ll have a conservative in there,” said one person, who, I assume, has no idea what a real conservative is.

There already are two fine conservative candidates seeking the nomination: Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo. And Fred Thompson does not even come close measuring up to them.

Fred Thompson is a neocon globalist.

It’s also funny, and possibly telling, that in this brief article Harrington uses the same “one person said” trick often employed by “Jim.” More than once, actually:

As one commentator notes: “Overall, Americans for Better Immigration gives [Thompson] a career grade of C…”

As a rhetorical strategy it subtracts the need to name sources, but it also subtracts credibility. I hesitate to suggest that Basil Harrington doesn’t exist — that he could simply be another invention of “Jim Robinson” — but I suppose I just did. They certainly both have a habit of posting their writings to as many websites as possible, and “Robinson” sure does like to quote “Harrington.”

I have sent Mr. Harrington an e-mail, which at least hasn’t bounced back. But even if he does reply, what would that prove? (Although to be fair, I’m not sure what it would disprove, either.)

III. Keeping Up With The Joneses

The epithet “neocon globalist,” as wielded by “Jim Robinson,” is often accompanied by a mention that Fred is a member of that venerable magnet for conspiracy nuts, the Council on Foreign Relations. Sometimes “Jim” (and possibly other anti-Fredheads) shortens this to “CFRed,” which I must concede is at least sort of clever.

But really, who cares about the CFR? Who actually thinks this book club for the political elite is some kind of, ahem, global conspiracy? Well, just plug CFR, neocon and globalist into Google and it doesn’t take long before you’ll find Infowars, the conspiracy site run by fringe online radio host Alex Jones.

It may be worth pointing out — and I swear, I’ve avoided using this name for as long as I could — that Ron Paul is now a repeat guest on Jones’ online radio show. And while the last time on he didn’t actually say that the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks (a favorite theory of Jones’) he certainly did court the support of that theory’s most high-profile proponents. This connection between simultaneous support for Ron Paul, fear of globalism, hatred of neocons, and interest in the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, among other conspiracies (ice hockey and Alanis Morrisette (there’s that Canadian thing again…)) can be found on this YouTube account, and this one and this one. And this one.

So at long last, let’s go back to Caldwell’s fascinating piece for the NYT. Caldwell does not mention Alex Jones and he doesn’t invoke the hoary threat of “neocon globalism,” but he does invoke another name which is better known to conservatives: John Birch.

Paul never deals in disavowals or renunciations or distancings, as other politicians do. In his office one afternoon in June, I asked about his connections to the John Birch Society. “Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!” he said in mock horror. “Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with. Because they’re real strict constitutionalists, they don’t like the war, they’re hard-money people. . . . ”

Paul’s ideological easygoingness is like a black hole that attracts the whole universe of individuals and groups who don’t recognize themselves in the politics they see on TV. To hang around with his impressively large crowd of supporters before and after the CNN debate in Manchester, N.H., in June, was to be showered with privately printed newsletters full of exclamation points and capital letters, scribbled-down U.R.L.’s for Web sites about the Free State Project, which aims to turn New Hampshire into a libertarian enclave, and copies of the cult DVD “America: Freedom to Fascism.”

But the truth is, and here I hope the Ronulans will give me a break (even if I did just call them Ronulans), these people are not all supporters of Ron Paul. They stand along the fringe with him, and include many who are not Republican Party members. Some of them can be found in the Constitution Party, one example being “Unfit for Command” co-author Jerome Corsi, who reportedly

also wonders when people will realize that Thompson, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a globalist who would push for open borders.

Corsi is also known for promoting the theory that President Bush is pushing for a single North American state much like the one imagined in David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (albeit with fewer Quebecois wheelchair assassins, one presumes.) As PostPolitical puts it,

Of course, why these absolutists suspect they’ll get a better society from the empowerment of the advocates of open borders, atheism and bureaucratic statism, is anyone’s guess. … This one has been sneaking up on us for awhile. It’s increasingly difficult to distinguish the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Michael Badnarik, Lou Dobbs and Ron Paul from each other, as representing different schools of political philosophy. That’s a very recent phenomenon and it bodes ill for the GOP.

So, this much we know about their leanings:

• They don’t like Fred Thompson
• They don’t appear to like many Republican politicians
• Only Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo (and sometimes Duncan Hunter) pass muster
• They conflate globalization with immigration
• They make little distinction between legal and illegal immigration
• They fear the Council on Foreign Relations
• They hate “neocons”
• Some of them think the U.S. government may be behind 9/11

This fear of a unified world government is like nothing so much as the conspiracy-minded views of the old John Birch Society, a group evicted from the GOP by one William F. Buckley Jr. nearly 50 years ago. Though the Birchers oppose government-backed wealth redistribution, they also (in its current, withered form) oppose government-backed free trade agreements. And they are, to put it mildly, weird people.

Like the Birchers, who at least managed to correctly identify international communism as an existential threat, Ron Paul is not wrong to maintain healthy fear of government encroachment on individual liberty. But one need not be a Bircher to fear communism, and one need not be a Truther to distrust the government.

Unfortunately for Ron Paul, he has cast his lot with them, and with that, has cast himself out of today’s mainstream Republican Party.

P.S. It should be said, our Basil is not this Basil (as far as I know).

It’s one thing to offer relevant criticisms of a candidate (or potential candidate), but making things up out of whole cloth is an obvious sign of desperation. From what I’ve seen, some people are desperately afraid of no one so much as Fred. Which people? Savvy readers will be able to guess for themselves, but I’ll save my comments on that for later.

This post tracks the activities of one (I assume it’s just one) shape-shifting anti-Fredhead and the ridiculous lengths to which he (I assume it’s a he) has gone in recent weeks to attack Fred in many a comment section across the left- and rightosphere. Let’s dig in:

I can’t remember where I first noticed somebody named “Jim Robinson” going after Fred, but thanks to the Oracle of Mountain View, it was not difficult to track his hilariously ineffective mau-mauing across the blogosphere. Early on, he sounded like a Rudy fan:

This guy is a joke and delussional if he thinks people qill vote for him because they like Arthur Branch. He has absolutely no executive experience and is less qualified for the job than Barack Huessein Obama.

Posted by: Jim Robinson | May 31, 2007 at 12:26 PM

This comment is a rarity not just for its expression of support for Giuliani, but also because it was posted at Gina Cobb’s website and hers only (the typos, as we shall see, were not a rarity). This next comment, on the other hand, found its way to at least three dozen comment sections, sometimes as Jim Robinson and sometimes as Thompson Truth File:

During his eight years in the Senate, Thompson won his free trade credentials with his votes to extend the president’s fast-track trade promotion authority and to approve permanent trading relations with China. One right-wing critic in a widely circulated internet column called Thompson a “neocon globalist” for his immigration, free trade, and foreign policy positions. Social conservatives are also likely to question Thompson’s “liberal” voting record on immigration. Although Thompson has recently written and spoken out about the need for strong border control, while in the Senate he voted to increase visas for skilled foreign workers and to increase permits for unskilled foreign farm workers. Overall, Americans for Better Immigration, an anti-immigration lobbying group, gives Thompson a career grade of C for his mixed voting record. Thompson will likely come under withering criticism from anti-immigrant candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who mixes his social conservatism with a heavy dose of nationalism and anti-corporate populism.

Posted by Thompson Truth File | June 11, 2007 4:26 PM

I particularly enjoy the bit about “one right-wing critic.” One assumes that the critic being quoted is either a figment of the author’s imagination or someone so fringey and insignifcant their name would provoke, at best, a quizzical look. Here our Mr. Robinson sounds more like a supporter of Rep. Tancredo — quite a leap for a recent Rudy-booster. Also weird is the detached, matter-of-fact nature of these statements, as if these are not the writer’s opinions, but perhaps you might be interested to know… know what? Fred is not an “anti-corporate populist”? Gee, that’s helpful.

Another comment, both too long and too slanderous to repeat here, was posted to a couple dozen different comment sections during the month of June — on conservative blogs such as Frank J’s IMAO and Steven Taylor’s PoliBlog, liberal blogs like Crooks and Liars and The Hollywood Liberal, even mainstream newspapers like the Denver Post and gossip site TMZ.com.

It may be a clue that “Jim Robinson” is almost surely stolen from Jim Robinson, the owner and operator of Free Republic. If you’re wondering, here’s what the real Jim Robinson thinks of Fred:

Unlike RudyMcRomney, Thompson/Hunter are not the media’s choice. Nor are they the Republican leadership’s choice. They’re the grassroots conservatives’ choice! Great concept, eh? … now that we have fine conservatives like Thompson, Hunter, Tancredo, et al, making solid progress … I’m starting to get optimistic about our chances.

Now, here’s “our” Jim at Michael van der Galien’s site, upon the news that Fred was (at the time) planning a trip to Israel:

Fred Thompson is going to Isreal to campaign for the US PResidency but cant be bothered with getting on the campaign trail and meeting actual US citizens. Thats rich. Sound like a globalist.

Oh Fred, you globalist, you! And see this from Wizbang Blue:

Thompson is a puppet of Karl Rove who is pushing an amnesty bill on a public that clearly doesnt want it. Why doesnt someone ask Thompson about his ties to Rove ans whether or not he supports theamnesty bill. So far Fred refuses to answer any questions and later this month he will be traveling to Isreal and London to campaign for the United States Presidency. Something very shady is going on and the people have a right to know who exactly Fred Thompson is.

Posted by Jim Robinson | June 12, 2007 4:27 PM

What’s that? Fred, a supporter of the misbegotten “comprehensive” immigration bill? Now, that’s worse than wrong — that’s outright dishonest. Fred has been speaking out against the bill in radio and web commentaries and at speeches in Virginia and Connecticut — listen to Fred in his own words.

Meanwhile, our pseudonymous critic actually stepped up this line of attack. Shedding “Jim Robinson” and adopting “FredsForAmnesty” — this may be my favorite handle — he decided to invent a quote and push it as far across the blogosphere as possible. See this comment, deposited on at least two dozen blogs in late June, here from The Jawa Report:

“We can not deport 12 million illegal aliens.” Fred Thompson

Posted by: FredsForAmnesty at June 20, 2007 05:45 PM

It’s easy to isolate because he spelled “cannot” as “can not.” Many people have said this, but Fred Thompson has not been among them.

Even more hilariously, this individual set up an account just to plant this made-up quote at lefty netroots homebase MyDD. Even better, a MyDD contributor actually told him where to go — indicating that this line of argument works on neither conservatives nor liberals. It’s almost too much.

And we haven’t even gotten to the other ridiculous nom-de-blog mentioned in the title, “RepublicansAgainstFred.” This moniker has been used at least three dozen times, on some of the most prominent blogs on the right. At Wizbang proper:

He is nothing more than a puppet of Roves and if he manages to fool the GOP primary voters into giving him the nomination, the GOP will get creamed in the general.

If Fred Thompson wins the nomination, I will immediately go out and register as an independent. I can not in good conscience vote for a completly inept and dishonest candidate. There is too much at stake.

Posted by RepublicansAgainstFred | June 19, 2007 1:49 PM

At Captain’s Quarters:

I dont care who endorses Freddie or comes out against him. I will never vote for Freddie. not in the primary and not in the general. He is a politcal HACK!

Posted by: RepublicansAgainstFred at July 2, 2007 12:41 PM

My favorite among these coincided with Fred’s recent trip to London, which included a meeting with Lady Thatcher and a speech before a private (not public, like the schools) center-right think tank. Here’s what he posted to California Yankee:

Who the hell does this guy think he is going to London and making statements about foreign policy? Last time I checked he was only a private citizen and he cleary has no authority to do so. He is out of line. WAY out of line.

Posted by: RepublicansAgainstFred | Tuesday, June 19, 2007 at 05:53 PM

Okay, now that’s just funny. And before I forget — RepublicanWomenAgainstFred? Definitely the same guy.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my point — some falsehood-spreading moron with way too much time on his hands has launched a comment-section crusade against Fred Thompson. If bloggers who have received his comments are interested in forwarding his IP address to me, I will gladly look into it further. It doesn’t really matter, though — the good news is that it doesn’t seem to be having any effect whatsoever. The bad news, such as it is, will be discussed in my next post.

In the meantime, feel free to suggest any additional instances of this laughable conspiracy of one in the comments.