Blog Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones

Fellow bloggers, readers, commenters: Lend me your eyes. I have come to praise Glenn Greenwald, not to bury him.

This unsavory blog points out something curious -- curious, but quite easily explained, as we shall soon see.

Several commenters, it appears, have appeared on several different blogs, under several different names, all defending Glenn Greenwald in not-so-different language, making not-very-different-at-all points about Mr. Greenwald's accomplishments and career and all-around fabulousness.

This blogger -- this internet smear-merchant -- hints, rather nastily, if you ask me, that perhaps these defenders of Glenn Greenwald are all, in fact, the same man. Go over to that blog to read these scurrillous suggestions.

Go ahead; scamper off but do not tarry; I shall wait for your return.

Ah. There you are again.

Are you as outraged as I am? I'll bet my last pence that you are. I'll bet your mitts are uncontrollably balling up for fisticuffs, as are mine.

How dare you, Shawn, make such sensationalist charges with such scant evidence. As Mr. Greenwald chastises us, day after day, such venomous charges are evidence of an unbalanced and quite possibly fascistic mind.

Pish-posh, I say, and say again: Pish-posh!

I shall have none of it. I will not abide your vicious and baseless innuendoes that Mr. Glenn Greenwald has a friend, a bosom chum, singing his praises on his behalf.

I know this is untrue, for I myself attacked Mr. Greenwald, and no one calling himself Glenn Greenwald responded in my thread, nor anyone identifying himself as a friend or even acquaintance of Mr. Greenwald.

So I ask you, Shawn -- if Mr. Greenwald felt compelled to respond to an attack on himself, would he not have done so under his own name, rather than having a friend offer the defense in his stead?

Of course he would. To do otherwise would be cowardly, craven, and cur-like, and quite beneath the accomplished and principled Mr. Greenwald, who each day spends countless hours documenting the underhandedness and, I might say, insidious chicanery of the right wing blogosphere.

Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you no decency at all?

If anything, Mr. Greenwald should be praised for his magnificent, almost angelic, level of stoic self-control. Truly the man has the steadfastness of a Buddhist monk, and the patience of a saint.

For, in this post, I baited Mr. Greenwald mercilessly. Viciously, one might say. I called him a "no-talent, no-account, no-name nobody."

I forbade other bloggers -- some, like Instapundit, far above my weight class -- from ever daring to link him again.

Tough stuff. But, alas, the sort of cheap invective I engage in daily.

And yet, Glenn Greenwald refused to rise to the bait. He refused to respond. A better man than I, whom he scarcely acknowleges (and I commend him for his good taste in that regard!), he left nary a comment in this post to defend his good name.

And I know he read the post. For here, in a post by Cassandra calling for a blogospheric time-out, he chastised her thusly for posting on a blog such as mine:

...

Then you went over to Ace's blog and said this:

If this whack job is spending time staring at his site meter and it gets his rocks off getting hits from the likes of me, that alone is revenge enough.

...

Posted by: Glenn Greenwald at July 13, 2006 02:13 PM

So he read my post, it seems, as well as the comments in the thread, which were hardly more charitable to him than my initial screed. I daresay it must have stung him; he showed a great deal of sensitivity to Cassandra's deeming him a "whack-job," after all.

And yet he did not respond to my insults.

Improving on Thoreau, he practiced impassive resistance.

Like an e-Gandhi, he refused respond to my verbal violence in any manner whatsoever.

Like an Internet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he turned the other cheek in the interest of internet civility.

One man -- Glenn Greenwald -- betrayed... with a kiss.

And yet it should be said, he was not truly required to defend himself.

For, as Fate would have it, he had a mighty champion lurking on the thread.

Someone, calling himself "Ellison" (perhaps, like Ellison's Invisible Man), did respond and defend Mr. Greenwald in the very thread that had so sullied his sterling reputation.

This Good Samaritan, fortunately enough for Glenn Greenwald, turns out to be a dedicated, one could say singular, fan of Mr. Greenwald.

Furthermore, this Stranger-Savior just happens to be casually fluent with most of the details of Mr. Greenwald's curriculum vitae, almost as if he were recalling the details of his own life, and possesses an almost personal appreciation for Mr. Greenwald's manifold accomplishments.

Let me quote this Dauntless Digital Defender in full. Responding to my accusation that Mr. Greenwald is a nobody who should be ignored, "Ellison" rejoins thusly:

Greenwald only has a New York Times Best Selling Book on the Bush Administration and its abuses of power. And he has one of the most-read blogs on the Interent, after 9 months of blogging. And Senators read from his blog at Senate hearings and his posts lead to front-page news stories in major newspapers.

Why would anyone think what he has to say matters? It's not like anyone listens to him. It's not like he's Ace, or Jeff Goldstein, or Patterico, or Sister Toldjah or Glenn Reynolds, or someone who really matters.

Great advice, you super-important bloggers should only to each other and about each other. Don't bother with anyone in the Left because if you ignore them, they'll just go away.

Posted by: Ellison on July 13, 2006 08:14 AM

That's in these comments, about a third of the way down. Search for the name "Ellison," because that is Mr. Greenwald's defender's name.

I ask again: Would a man who so stridently sermonizes the blogosphere upon the importance of honesty and fair-dealing ever, ever put a friend up to the impugnation of other bloggers' talent and open-mindedness? Nay-- he would have no part of such a shoddy deception. He would sign such a post in his own name, and proudly, or, if a friend should have written it on his behalf, then he would firmly instruct his friend to acknowlege their relationship. Surely he would not be so ungallant as to attack others while concealing his identity.

And so that is the end of the matter. Glenn Greenwald did not respond to me; a man named Ellison did in his stead. And I'm glad he did, for he told me as much about Glenn Greenwald as, say, Glenn Greenwald himself could.

How dare you, Shawn of The Sky Is Red, malign this man, who has demonstrated forebearance beyond the capacity of most men.

Shawn, Mr. Greenwald is a man of unrivaled principle, of unquestionable character, a man who quite piously lectures us, his lessers, from his pixelated pulpit twice, thrice, or even, um, quice a day, upon the virtues of honesty and integrity in all aspects one's writing and personal comportment.

Whence do you find the gall you suggest he would engage in any sort of disinegenuousness or mendacity in any of his many, many, many, well-nigh unending on-line interactions?

You should be ashamed of yourself, Shawn.

Indeed, we should all be ashamed for having read your baseless smears. I condemn thee, I condemn thee, I condemn thee, most strenuously and vigorously and utterly.

Let that be the end of this unfortunate matter. There is nothing more to say.

...

An Insignificant Addendum Of Vanishingly Trivial Import:

Oh wait -- as Columbo says, there's just one more thing.

Because Mr. Glenn Greenwald is such an all-around, tip-top capital chap, and soooo unflinchingly, uncompromisingly honest, I will do him a good turn, and hereby notify him with all due haste that this "Ellison" fellow --a person, presumably, entirely unrelated to him and in every way a perfect stranger -- seems to somehow have gotten control of Mr. Glenn Greenwald's computer and begun making posts from his IP address.

Compare the IP of certified Glenn Greenwald fan "Ellison" here...

...with the IP from Glenn Greenwald himself here, which is quoted from this argument Mr. Greenwald had with Patterico over at Patterico's place.

Note that in both screen-captures, the final two digits of the IP have been erased to protect Mr. Greenwald's privacy, but they are in fact identical, as the good Mr. Patterico can readily attest. Further, should the disreputable jackanapes "Ellison" be so brazen as to gainsay that the IP's are precisely identical, I can readily reproduce them both in full, so set am I to unmask "Ellison" in his pilferage. I shall not have my honesty questioned, even to protect the noble and badly-used Mr. Greenwald.

Ellison, although I know you believe your actions to be necessary and warranted under the circumstances, I must say that this is no justification whatsoever for posting messages from Glenn Greenwald's computer, or for signing on to his wireless account, or for whatever other sort of cybernetic skullduggery you may have gotten yourself mixed up in.

And Mr. Greenwald-- I hope you appreciate my bringing of this matter to your attention, and I hope that you resolve any dispute you may have with this "Ellison" chappie in an amicable manner.

I pray that there is no ugliness over this unfortunate incident; in many ways, you both seem extremely similar, two peas in a pod almost, a left hand working in perfect harmony with a right.

I shan't want anything to come between you, though you both seem so oddly close, two halves of the same coin, as it were, so like-minded -- nay, single-minded, I should say -- that I'm not sure it would actually be possible to come between you at all.

Mr. Patterico has some training in matters legal, and may be able to offer you some assistance in this regard, Mr. Greenwald, should that become, unfortunately, necessary.

Godspeed to both of you, and may both of your destinies remain, as they seem now, inexplicably intertwined.

And, just a thought: It occurs to me that some of Mr. Greenwald's other defenders and champions -- "Wilson," "Sam Mathews," perhaps even others yet unknown -- might be similarly pirating Mr. Greenwald's wireless signal.

It might well be prudent to inquire into that grim possibility as well, distasteful as it may be to comtemplate.

Online Intergity Issues: For those who worry that exposing Mr. Greenwald's IP somehow puts him in jeopardy, let me reassure you that his IP -- and the IP that the thief-fiend "Ellison" is hijacking -- traces to the Latin American and Carribean IP assignment network.

As I am quite certain that neither Mr. Greenwald, nor the misguided bandwidth pirate "Ellison," are denizens of such torrid climes -- it would be hard to fight for precious civil liberties in American courts from such a domicile -- I am reasonably confident that Greenwald and/or Ellison is using an anonymizer, or perhaps somehow letting an IP address from our friends to the south, and the disclosure of his IP does not endanger him.

Further, of course, the IP has been stripped of its ultimate, and penultimate, digits, thus rendering the partial IP quite useless for any nefarious purpose.

And good that it is so useless, for I should not want to live long in a world without moral paragons like Mr. Glenn Greenwald to guide us with such exquisite sanctimony. Wait-- is that the right word? Is there a word that means "sanctimony," but in a good way?

Lastly, this brigand and ruffian "Ellison" is stealing a service Mr. Greenwald pays for, so I thought he should like the conclusive evidence of the scoundrelry as speedily, and as accurately rendered, as possible. If Mr. Greenwald needs the full proof -- the full IP's -- I am more than eager to assist him in this regard. I am here to help, after all.

Again, it is my fondest hope that this unfortunate situation can be resolved without undue difficulty or embarrassment to any party involved, even this well-meaning but unscrupulous dastard "Ellison."

posted by Ace at 02:18 AM

| Access Comments