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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

One tiny problem: Charles Johnson has never been a member of the "right wing". He's a liberal who's eyes were opened by 9/11, but as the jihadist threat receded he reverted to type.

It would be pretty silly to expect his "right-wing allies" to continue to be such when he attacks so many of them on such scurrilous grounds. I've only watched his feud with Stacy McCain, but that's enough for me.

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That's a gross mischaracterization. Charles Johnson wasn't really a Liberman style anti-jihadist democrat. He really was part of the strong defense/small gonvernment style conservative base. His problem has been (for a very long time) the hateful religious right who he feels has too much influence with the GOP leaders.

Just because he's pro-science doesn't mean he's liberal per se.

I do not think science has anything to do with it. My impression of Charles is he is liberal in the classical sense of the word, not the modern American sense (loosely related to the left side of the political spectrum). So I am not surprised he is picking fights with the Right as well as the Left.

(Disclaimer: I never read the comment threads on LGF, only his postings. The threads I saw were dreadful to me.)

He may style himself as a "liberal in the classical sense of the word", but his behavior is pretty illiberal in the old sense of the word, e.g. see Tangurena's comment on his dedication to open discourse or rather lack thereof.

He also has too many fixations that are characteristic of the Left/new style liberals for me to take that self-characterization very seriously.

It didn't take me long to find stuff supporting my take, e.g. from the horse's mouth http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/neontommy/2009/12/charles-john...

"I've been telling people for a long time, if they wanted to listen, that I was a social liberal. I actually fought against being classified as a right-wing blog for a long time."

Read more at that link; that plus a little Google Fu shows that his issues with the "right-wing" go way beyond the "hateful religious right".

ADDED: Ah, here's his "Why I Parted Ways With The Right" essay (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_W...). Very little of that has to do with "the hateful religious right" or even the GOP.

> as the jihadist threat receded

Seriously?

That's my not thoroughly examined interpretation. Spend some quality time with your favorite search engine, e.g. using R. Stacy McCain as a starting point (CJ claims he's racist), and you'll find plenty of others.

Or are you questioning my "as the jihadist threat receded"? In that case, I mean that it's receded in the minds of Americans due to a lack of successful attacks in the West or on Westerners (e.g. Bali). India, for example, has a rather different interpretation on that, and of course we in the US have seen at least three serious attacks in 2009, two successful (at that Arkansas recruiting center, Ft. Hood and of course the Knicker Bomber).

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