I’ll admit, I think this was my weakest appearance. Our discussion leaned heavily toward economic systems and policy, which admittedly has not been a focus of my reading ever since, well, about the time I moved to the District. Funny, that. However, the Bheads forum regulars yet again seem not to hate me and even sort of have my back, for which I am grateful.

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).

William Beutler:

New Media Strategies, my employer and the folks who pay the bills around here, has been contracted to advise on Internet outreach for Fred Thompson’s nascent presidential campaign. I’ll be working under Howard Mortman (aka Blog P.I.’s Higgins) alongside Jon Henke (he’d be our Face Man, if Blog P.I. was named for The A-Team; see his concurrent announcement at QandO) and others from the crack Public Affairs staff here in scenic Rosslyn, Virginia. As everybody knows by now, Fred’s campaign is putting an emphasis on using new online tools in innovative ways, and we’re honored to take part in the effort.

I generally keep my own politics off Blog P.I., but I’ll make an exception here: Thompson will have my vote, even though I live in the District, where the Republican party might as well not even have a presidential primary. For what it’s worth, I’d describe my politics as right-libertarian; I’m a pragmatist with a preference for limited-government solutions. And as Cato@Liberty wrote of Fred last week, “On federalism, there may be no better candidate.”” Not to mention his strong record of fiscal conservatism, something the GOP could stand to stand for again. He’s also been realistic about Iraq, that we are left with no “good options,” the war was a good one but done badly, and leaving it to the Qaedists is the worst option. He’s a solid conservative and a “happy warrior” with more ideas than he’s given credit for (so far) and is already running a whole new kind of campaign. If you’re at all inclined to cast a Republican ballot, Fred Thompson is definitely the best choice.

Regular readers (I assume you exist) will notice that I have mentioned Thompson a few times over the past few weeks. For most of that period, I knew it was a possibility that we’d be working for the campaign — though we certainly weren’t being paid. Even so, I only mentioned him where the analysis would suffer for his absence. And for what it’s worth, I did write about him (favorably) before this even started.

What does this mean for Blog P.I.? The site will remain “an ongoing series of investigations into, studies about, and commentaries on uses of the Internet in U.S. politics” where “the writers have their ideological blindspots like anyone else” but “aim for observation and reason, not assumption and opinion.” You may start noticing more overtly positive comments about Fred Thompson, but they’ll stay rooted in analysis — and I’ll post a disclaimer whenever his name comes up.

Not Paul Begala:

My choice for president and the only candidate that I want to work for is Barack Obama.

It comes down to a simple formulation championed by his main opponent: change vs. more of the same. This country is in desperate need of change.

I am not one of those Dems that says Hillary Clinton cannot win the presidency. If she is the general election nominee in fact, I’ll guarantee she will win. There is no more strategic and ruthless political family in the country and 2004 showed that the mechanics of campaigning can win elections regardless of issues and facts. As a serial campaigner, I can admire that.

But I don’t want to win on a technicality. I want change, I want a movement, I want a governing philosophy and a majority that implements it. Obama’s mantra — that individual achievement is amplified when done through collective action is the antithesis to the “every man for himself” mantra of conservatism in the past 20 years.

I want a nominee who will not only battle for people’s votes, but their hearts, minds and souls.

Olly Ruff:

I am not an employee of New Media Strategies, and I don’t aspire to work for the Obama campaign. In fact, as a non-resident alien, I don’t think I’m supposed to do things like endorse candidates for President. So, in what is either a principled ethical stand or simply a craven attempt to preserve my visa status, I pledge to carefully maintain my neutrality and objectivity throughout, and to eschew the cheap partisanship of my colleagues as I advocate for what I hope will become the moderate consensus position.

In few communities has the outsize influence of the Ronbots (borrowing more from “Romneybot” than “Rahmbot” here) been felt more than fast-rising social news website Digg. Digg is a prize target for manipulators — getting listed on the front page all but guarantees a tidal wave of traffic headed toward the submitted link. After repeated revisions to the algorithm, it apparently remains no less vulnerable.

Paul supporters have been moving stories onto the front page for a couple weeks now, and while I found it curious and somewhat amusing, Diggers are quirky and I didn’t find it illegitimate or overly distracting — that is, until this morning.

Check out the top five stories, as of about 7:30 Eastern time:

Those top three are not quite all the same story, but they are certainly variations on a theme. Note also the separation in digg totals with the next two, non-Paul submissions. And considering Paul’s negligible support in meatspace, one gets the distinct impression that the system has been gamed.

Others have suggested that his online support is manufactured. I don’t think that’s the case. Click through the headlines (here, here and here), take a look at the comments and the digging (voting) histories of the users submitting them (here, here and here). They may all be acting in concert, but there’s no reason to believe these are not legitimate members — two of the three submitters signed up last summer.

But even if they are acting sincerely, this is simply not what the vast majority of users go to to Digg for. The website is at its best when it provides variety. Forerunner Slashdot has codified this as “The Omelette,” but Digg manages to create this organically. Most of the time.

To cherry pick just one comment out of the third story, here is user 9Digits throwing up his hands:

I’m an anti-war Republican, and I still find your candidate’s campaign to be goddamn annoying. If these are the type of supporters he’s got, there’s not a chance in hell I’ll vote for him.

This follows the Ronbots’ success in compelling ABC News to add their candidate to an online poll. That doesn’t bother me so much, except as ABC knew well, the poll was about to be freeped. But it also follows Charles Johnson’s decision to delist Paul from his online poll at Little Green Footballs. To whatever degree ABC News has an obligation to create a level playing field, even one that they know will be gamed, Johnson has less of one.

And yet that still says more about the general uselessness of online polls than about Paul’s supporters. Is the backlash unfair? Perhaps it would be, if they didn’t seem so prone to the same kind of vitriol that sometimes still causes trouble for their counterparts on the left.

If Paul’s supporters are willing to take the effort to game online communities not already predisposed to isolationist libertarianism they should be willing to accept the consequences. That certainly means their own ostracism — but it also risks creating the impression that Paul’s support is manufactured. And especially in politics, people don’t like being played.

One can trace the excitement surrounding Lindsey’s essay, and perhaps even the piece itself, to an early June post at Daily Kos, by site founder/show runner Markos Moulitsas. That entry, which he later described as “a throwaway blog post,” drew plenty of snickers from Beltway conservative types, but it certainly wasn’t ignored.

In October, the Cato Institute — typically identified with Republicans far more than Democrats — made Moulitsas’ arguments the centerpiece of the October edition of Cato Unbound. Just before the election, Moulitsas made his pitch for libertarians to pull a lever for the Dems in Reason magazine.

These articles drew plenty more attention, of which Lindsey’s article could be considered the latest entry. One need not buy into the notion of an uneasy left/libertarian fusionism being at all likely to replace the uneasy right/libertarian one to find it interesting — and indeed, for all the kind things said about Lindsey himself this past week, almost everybody’s wallets are staying firmly in pocket.

That’s a lot of pockets, too. Among the libertarians, liberals and conservatives who have weighed in on Lindsey’s essay:

Daniel Drezner
Will Wilkinson
Stephen Bainbridge
Tyler Cowen
Sebastian Mallaby
Matthew Yglesias
Virginia Postrel
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ezra Klein
Todd Zywicki
Ilya Somin
Julian Sanchez
John Derbyshire
Tim Lee
Kevin Drum
Robert Farley
John Tabin
Jesse Walker
Jonah Goldberg
Bruce McQuain
John Miller
Michael Brendan Dougherty

Of course, not everyone who might be expected to comment has done so. Among those who have not weighed in since Lindsey’s article went up:

A blog that is actually called Liberaltarian
Markos Moulitsas

It’s not that he’s been away from the site. In fact, he’s posted 55 times (at the time of this writing) and on a wide array of topics, from the inevitability of Obama to general site maintenance. I realize that the pat response to these questions is “don’t complain about the free ice cream.” But I’m curious as to why Moulitsas has abruptly disengaged from the debate.

The cynical view would be that with the election now in the past and Democrats victorious, there is no longer any need to reach out to potential new voters. The slightly less cynical view, and the one I endorse, is that Moulitsas was using the term “libertarian” too loosely in the first place. Go back to his seminal post, and notice that he literally begins by seeking to describe why he likes rugged, outdoorsy, sometimes Mountain West politicians such as Senator-elect Jon Tester — and it goes on to deliberately ignore the profound differences between liberal and libertarian philosophies of government. Altogether, it sounds less like argument born of principles, and more like searching for a coherent way to describe his favored candidates.

Moulitsas’ influence currently runs strongly to matters campaign-related, but the interest surrounding his “Libertarian Democrat” post suggests that people are willing to give him a shot as an actual thinker as well. Alas, now that the liberaltarian concept has “crashed the gates” (if you will) it would seem he doesn’t have much more to add. (He announced in the June post that his “next book” will be about the libertarian Democrat. Is that still a go?) Unless he has the conviction to defend his arguments in the public ’sphere — or a whole lot more “throwaway” ideas — he may again find himself relegated to being just what he says he doesn’t want to be: An ATM for Democratic campaigns.

P.S. Does anybody else remember that at one time, Brink Lindsey was a blogger? His former site remains where it always was, the blogroll still a who’s who of the early right-libertarian blogosphere. His his final post in mid-2003 should be considered a classic of the genre. Excerpted:

I’ve lost the will to blog. Actually, I lost it some time ago, but I’ve been trudging along in hopes that I would find new inspiration. I haven’t.

So enough. I’m hanging it up for a while. I plan to take the summer off — at least. Maybe I’ll come back in the fall, maybe I won’t.

I’ve argued before that one need not actually be a blogger to be a part of the blogosphere, and three years later, Lindsey’s currency reinforces that.