How the lizard mind works

Newsflash: the Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia is found with a gunshot wound to his head. Here's how LGF regulars reacted to the news:

#127 Mike C. 3/30/2005 03:10AM PST


The Isreali ambassador to Ethiopia is in critical condition after being shot by an unknown gunman in that shithole of a country.

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#129 manker 3/30/2005 03:13AM PST


127 Mike C.

Is it really any stretch to guess who shot him?

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#133 zonekeeper 3/30/2005 03:31AM PST


127, where did you see that? I don't see a mention on Foxnews...?

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#153 Mike C. 3/30/2005 04:39AM PST

In a shithole like Ethiopia ? Yeah, it IS a question. Could have been probably any random person selected from 2/3rds of the freaking population, for any one of a thousand reasons. These are not nicely-behaved people, in large part.

Interesting, isn't it? Now let's see what the Israeli Foreign ministry has to say (as quoted in Ha'aretz): "Shooting appeared to be a suicide attempt"

Was Sgrena's car fired on from behind?

Interesting new information emerges which could explain some of the mysteries surrounding the shooting of Guiliana Sgrena and Nicola Calipari in Iraq by US forces.

Australians see sense while their leaders pander to US

Most Australians consider U.S. foreign policy to be as threatening as Islamic fundamentalism, according to a survey released Monday.

More than two-thirds of respondents, 68 percent, said Australia takes "too much notice" of the United States when setting its foreign policy agenda, and 57 percent judged U.S. foreign policy to be as much of a threat as Islamic fundamentalism.

AP Story

The real Charles Johnson

Our operatives in Southern California have been wiring through disturbing reports that the kerfuffle over the Terri Schiavo case caused a temporary seizure of Charles Johnson's brain similar to the one that took place on 9/11. It is believed that Charles has returned to the 'ueber-Lib' state of mind he was in for the previous 50 years.

Unconfirmed reports say the Lizard King will soon be displaying his more 'caring' side, and come out strongly in favor of:

- Gay Marriage (not that HE is gay or anything...!)

- Free trade (just keep out the Mexicans, the Arabs, the Indonesians, you know...people)

- Abortion (especially for Palestinians)

- Rule of Law (but not UN resolutions, goddamit)

- restrictions on SUVs (smaller cars means less oil means less money to the Saudis: you know it makes sense)

- Evolution (the Lizards may be stuck in the pre-Cambrian, but Charles hopes he'll make it to homo erectus (no, not THAt homo erectus!) some day)

Stay tuned for more shocking revelations about CJ's liberal side.

Republican change of heart?

While one hand gives...

...the other hand takes. We've been having a bit of a discussion this easter weekend about Charles Johnson's treatment of the Schiavo story. Those of you who also dare to venture onto LGF propre once in a while will have noticed that he didn't take the right-wing line one would have expected of him. Instead, Charles has sensibly pointed out that a) it's all very well to judge from afar but if you're not in the situation of having to make life and death decisions yourself, you really can't pontificate about how someone else should act, and b) you need to take the hard science into account in this case, and all the available evidence seems to suggest that Schiavo is in an irreversable state and has no higher mental functions left.

For his views (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15207) CJ has been getting a lot of flak from his fellow travellers on the right, but strangely he has decided that it's the left which normally takes the hardline attitude towards political opinions: that "you're either with us or against us". Where has this man been for the last 60 years? If anything, it's the left's one big weakness that it tolerates so many dissenting views on the same topic. The right is all about streamlining views, groupthink, rigid adherence to basic principles and the stamping out of unorthodox views. To make out it is the left (or more specifically, the Democratic Party) which drives a fascist line is more naive than we thought even a Lizard King could be, but there you go.

Two cheers for Charles daring to go against the flow on Schiavo. Two boos for the spectacular contortions that see him suddenly claim open-mindedness and tolerance as right-wing virtues...

Peaceful protest, lizard style

What happens when supporters of Little Green Footballs decide to go to 'blue state' California to confront those crazy leftists at Indymedia? They get tooled up for violence, of course (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15151#c0278):

#278 Iron Fist 3/21/2005 07:37PM PST

Yeah, the PRC has some nutcase laws on knives. Blade has to be less than 2" long, but it can be a switch. Go figure.

That actually makes it more dangerous, not less. If I have a big fighter, I'll try and cut off some fingers or something. Hell, they can generally sew 'em back on. A little blade means femorals, kidneys, brachials, and carotids. I have to go for the kill-shot because the blade can't perform the disabling strike.

Not to mention the fact that most people are going to wilt if I pull out an 8" fighter.

A 2" blade doesn't look lethal. Go in just above the pubic bone 1" to the left of the naval, yank it 1" to the right of it. 100% dead. No chance of survival.

The target is the aorta just before it bifurcates into the femoral arteries. If you miss and just get a femoral, oh well.

Personally, I hope they stay home."

More lizard baiters

Charles handily puts us onto a bunch of people equally disgusted with the green-scaly-One's antics:

First, Charles' favourite enemies: the forum of Democratic Underground

Next, someone called Nathan Newman, whom the lizard picked on after he posted unpatriotic comments about the four mercenaries who met their untimely end in Iraq last year.

Then, Catch, a site which picked out the great LGF line:

"if a vote for Bush means wars in Iran, North Korea, and Syria, I want to vote for him twice."

And finally, the American Politics Journal, which is likely to be the subject of Charles' wrath for some time to come...

Welcome to the club, friends :-)

Rattling the lizard cage

The LGF inmates are seething because Google News seems to be picking up items from the racist website National Vanguard, but continues to blank LGF (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15145).

Surely that kind of thing should be worn as a badge of honour by the lizard crew: they're shunned by the 'mainstream media' AND seen as more dangerous than a bunch of redneck Nazis! What more could the scaly-ones want?

LGFers protest Daily Kos meeting

(Hat Tip WTF)

Sick Lizard

Charles informs us today that he's ill with some sort of stomach bug and thus won't be posting much. What: the great lizard conspiracy's can't pay some other racist conspiracy theorist to substitute for ONE day? I'm sure nobody would be able to tell the difference...

We wonder what it was that got Charles down? Did he drink too much green beer yesterday or was it the leprechauns of justice who fed him the bug?

Bedside reports please!

Looking better?

We've done a little bit more work on the site and think it should display a lot better for most people now. Feeback, particularly from Internet Explorer and Opera users, very welcome...

Iraq quotes

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq’. I heard him say: ‘The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.’

In February 2001, I heard Colin Powell say that Saddam Hussein ‘has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.’

That same month, I heard that a CIA report stated: ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’

In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.’

Read more of What I heard about Iraq

Absolute nonsense

Charles doesn't like to be criticized (in case you hadn't noticed) and he certainly doesn't like being criticized by the mainstream media. In a post with the title 'MSM Election Coverage: Incredibly Biased' (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15062), he holds forth about the integrity of LGF:

Before any possibly controversial stories are posted here, the facts are carefully checked. The responses from fellow bloggers and readers serve to catch those instances when the first line of fact-checking misses something, or is mistaken. The idea that blogs “publish anything” without regard for factual truth is a smear, pure and simple, coming from an organization that feels threatened by something it can’t understand.

Well, let's see, there's the time when Charles tripped over Giuliana Sgrena's car, when he made up a quote, when he helped distort the Dean Scream, when he made up 'facts' about the British education system, when he purposefully misquoted Ted Turner, when he held back some pertinent background information on a student whose story of college anguish he was promoting, when he....need we go on?

It's plain and simple: Charles Johnson is a liar and a fantasist. His weblog hardly meets the standards of blogging, let alone gutter journalism. His bias is so obvious a three-year old could recognise it. And this guy moans about the 'MSM' criticizing blogs for not being rigorous enough with their facts? Give the world a break, Charles.

Different views on Eason Jordan, John Bolton and the Ohio count

TruthOut has an in-depth investigation into the allegation that the US military purposefully targets journalists in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Sidney Blumenthal has a different take than LGF on Bush's new appointee for US ambassador to the UN:

In the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.

Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were redoing the security council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world," Bolton once said. Lately, as undersecretary of state for arms control, he has wrecked all the nonproliferation diplomacy within his reach. Over the past two decades he has been the person most dedicated to trying to discredit the UN. George Orwell's clock of 1984 is striking 13.

Continue reading 'The enemy within'

Finally, Christopher Hitchens returns to that disputed count in Ohio during the recent US presidential elections.

Charles Johnson: biting off more than he can chew

Without wanting to give CJ any leeway, one of the reasons he trips up so often isn't because he's a genuine wingnut (which he is), but because he jumps to conclusions too quickly. Every report that could possibly support his view of events gets sucked into the LGF-machine only for it to frequently choke on obvious contradictions.

Take the item 'Italy Didn't Plan Safe Escape for Sgrena' (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14989), in which Johnson quotes an Italian newspaper as saying that the Italian secret service "rented an inconspicuous pickup truck to recover Miss Sgrena" (his emphasis).

The next item on his blog, Sgrena's Car (The Real One) (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14990), has pictures of said "pickup truck" - except it's not a pickup truck at all. It's a silver saloon. Doesn't CJ notice these things?

LGF hate figure: Danny Schechter

Charlie has a new enemy: "vituperative far-left wacko" Danny Schechter (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14977). Why? Because Schechter has asked some questions about the Sgrena story that CJ doesn't like. So what's Schechter's response to the lizard onslaught? To go into hiding? To take back everything he said? Nothing of the sort:

I was attacked for showing "solidarity with the communist anti-war Italian left: Was Giuliana Sgrena Targeted?" Actually my blog is titled differently. Quite differently I asked: "Why Was Giuliana Targeted -- Or Was She?" The words "Or was she" conveniently buried in the smear. The article nominally about me then slides into an attack on Democratic Underground of which I am not a member. No matter.

Spot on, Danny. Charles Johnson has never cared for accuracy or truth when it doesn't suit his agenda. The more people pointing that out, the better.

Talking shit, Charles Johnson style

LGF Überlizard Charles F Johnson is working himself into a Dan Rather over the Guiliana Sgrena story because he just can't - won't - accept that anything a foreign journalist (and one who writes for a COMMUNIST newspaper too!) could ever be true, especially if it involves saying bad things about US troops.

Yesterday, after more than half a dozen fruitless attempts at finding some fault in Sgrena's story, Charles pounces on a shoddy translation of one of her articles on CNN (remember Charles, CNN is the enemy too!), declaring that Sgrena's account of driving "so fast through 'puddles' that they were 'almost losing control'" conflicts with the driver's claim that the car wasn't speeding, and so her whole story must be false. Gotcha!

Except, she never said anything about driving "so fast". Charles made it up. Read the relevant paragraph in her account:

The car kept on the road, going under an underpass full of puddles and almost losing control to avoid them. We all incredibly laughed. It was liberating. Losing control of the car in a street full of water in Baghdad and maybe wind up in a bad car accident after all I had been through would really be a tale I would not be able to tell. Nicola Calipari sat next to me. The driver twice called the embassy and in Italy that we were heading towards the airport that I knew was heavily patrolled by U.S. troops. They told me that we were less than a kilometer away...when...I only remember fire. At that point, a rain of fire and bullets hit us, shutting up forever the cheerful voices of a few minutes earlier.

Why is Charles resorting to such a blatant and transparent lie? Is this all his puny lizard brain can come up with these days? Fabricated quotes? Google News take note...

Daily Kos hits the nail on the head

LGF a haven of civility? At last someone's got the sense to point out the obvious:

"Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, and littlegreenfootballs, [are blogs] which share among them the distinction of not merely being far-right, but are a specific subset of the racist right in which civility is seen with the approximate frequency of August snowstorms."

Fafblog: 'Liberation at Gunpoint: Now More Than Ever'

"Freedom has been on the crawl of late. From the reforms of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine to the upheavals in Lebanon to Hosni Mubarak’s promise of a slightly less rigged election in Egypt’s near future, the Mideast is taking confident baby-steps toward a more democratic future – and mostly as a response simply to civil demonstrations and diplomatic pressure. One might draw the conclusion that it is therefore possible to nudge corrupt and tyrannical regimes in the direction of freedom and democracy without massive preventive invasions, enormous loss of life, and inaccurate, bad-faith presentations of casus belli. But one would be wrong – oh, so terribly wrong. For had the United States not bludgeoned Iraq into a quasi-democratic shape, the Muslim world would never have thought to try democracy on its own. Indeed, before the Iraq war, Arabs scarcely knew that democracy existed."

Faf on

LGF reader spotted in Kentucky

From Horkulated

"WE WANT EURABIA!"

Pearsall Helms writes:

"One thing that I've always found laughable about many of the right-wing cheerleaders for the Iraq War is that while they cry crocodile tears over the fate of the Iraqi people under Saddam elsewhere they engage in completely unrestrained racism against other Arab peoples. This is especially the case with the Palestinians, where you have to hold your nose when you wade through the comments sections of any stories dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on blogs like Little Green Footballs, and with Muslim immigrant communities in the West, particularly in Europe."

From: Cry of the Neocons: "WE WANT EURABIA!"

A different take

(Seen on Indymedia UK)

We're redesigning...

...so please have patience, we're writers not geeks ;-)

LGF Stalkers

Charles is upset this week, because he's finally realise that while he can kick anyone he doesn't like the look of off his own site (bar the odd pet 'liberal' to poke fun at), his powers of censorship don't extend to the rest of the Internet. In fact, you can be pretty sure that. wherever the name Charles Johnson is mentioned, there'll be someone with a story of racist hatred and bigotry to tell about him.

So too on the weblog of mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, CA. Granted, there are some comments about LGF on there that might be described as uncouth, but is CJ really in a position to complain about the 'vitriol' directed at him and his lizard friends? Take a look, for example, at the first three comments on the LGF thread about the mayor's blog:

#1 BabbaZee 2/27/2005 08:12AM PST


The name registered to my address by this obsessed anonymous cyber-stalker: ?I Spit On Vets.?


It's John F'in Kerry?



#2 munchkin 2/27/2005 08:14AM PST


I guess that means he spits on John Kerry, right? Since we all know what a distinguished vietnam vet that one was...*rolls eyes*



#3 Ferris Bueller 2/27/2005 08:16AM PST


Signing you up for a discussion forum under an obnoxious nic? I see the left is still up to their usual mature level of intellectual discourse. What's next, for them, peeing in your sandbox?

So, Charles, quit moaning about 'stalkers'. You and your minions have made the stalking of others your life's mission: take Ward Churchill, take Dan Rather, take Eason Jordan, take Maurice Hinchey...need we go on? LGF is the Internet equivalent of the drunken village mob, tracking down individuals and persecuting them on the basis of half-truths and distortions. To complain of being 'stalked' may fit Charles's paranoid mindset (journalists we have spoken to regularly describe him as curiously anxious and jittery), but it bears little relation to LGF's relationship with the rest of the blogosphere.

Compare and contrast

Charles Johnson has written a lot about the case of former CNN journalist Eason Jordan, but most of it comes loaded with the assumption that Jordan DID say what Charles claims he did, and that the story is one of 'why didn't Jordan resign earlier' and 'aren't the MSM a bunch of lying bastards'. Compare this with Jesurgislac's Livejournal entry: Eason Jordan: what's the real scandal?