Bad Moon Risen

Forgive the disorganized nature of this post. I have tried to both figure out what was going on in a story I knew little about while digesting it here. That's a dificult trick, and I haven't pulled it off elegantly. It's late, and I've done the best I could.

...

It did not take precognition on the level of Nostradamus to predict, as in my Bad Moon Rising post below, that something ugly was in the air. There seems to be a bus-accident of a human being afoot, or maybe several, and things are getting ugly.

This is not some petty vanity with sock-puppets anymore. It's escalated into an area that most would consider fairly serious. Patterico describes it, basically, as Deb Frisch. Plus a little something extra. It's moved from the merely objectionable to the possibly actionable.

It involves Jason Leopold, you won't be shocked to hear. How directly I don't know; but it all swirls around him, and his various ardent defenders, including one unhinged man named "John Thomas Dean," and of course former CIA agent and MSM go-to "expert" Larry Johnson, now a disgraceful political hostaet-man and a budding conspiracy theorist with some real promise and who, in his spare time, serves as Joe Wilson's pimp.

Read this. You'll want this background when it all comes out. This is the best digest of the recent situation. But even this stuff, as bad as it is, is sort of trivial to some of the other stuff going on.

This is Seixon's short-form digest of the story, also required reading.

Long story short: AnonymousArmy is a poster on DailyKos. He objected to Leopold's claim of proof of the "Rove indictment," and pointed out stuff like, oh, the docket number he kept citing as being on the indictment wasn't even assigned until several days after Leopold claims to have seen it.

Or have been told it existed by someone who'd seen it. Whatever the hell his claim was.

AnonymousArmy, as I understand it, believed the left was putting too much faith in the claims of Joe Wilson and his pimp Larry Johnson.

Leopold began harrassing AnonymousArmy, and escalating that harrassment, and, of course, escalating that harrassment via sock-puppets.

Some of these sock-puppets were exposed, and the story was picked up by Seixon, who also began getting abused by sock-puppets.

But sock-puppet abuse is one thing; this is something else entirely. A Leopold defender (apparently not Leopold himself) named "John Tomas Dean" now gets involved:

Mr. Dean called my parents home in the United States (I live in Norway). He passed himself off as someone doing research for an article, got my father to confirm some things, and also divulged that he had researched my mother and father’s activities to do with a “liberal� cause.

On June 26th and June 27th, personal details about me were disclosed at Think Progress where I had been commenting frequently for the past few weeks. Think Progress management declined to remove the comments, citing the fact that the details could be found on the Internet, although this still violated their Terms of Use.

Whoever is sock-puppeting for Leopold just happens to share Leopold's obsessiveness in searching for references to his name on Technorati. (Have you heard this story before?)

As readers of this site know, someone calling himself "Seixon" posted all of the real Seixon's personal information in a post. And then, tonight, someone attempting to discredit AnonymousArmy posted as "AnonymousArmy" and posted this hateful screed about "Jason Jew Leopold," outing his personal information (supposedly) with a big helping of extremely crude, KKK-level Jew-hatred.

A nasty post. But one cannot help but suspect the post was designed to aid Jason Leopold, not hurt him, by discrediting an enemy, and drawing sympathy for Leopold's supposedly thuggish treatment by his critics.

Which, I should say, does not mean at all that Leopold did it. But someone acting in his interests seems to.

Now, AnonymousArmy has contacted me, through an intermediary who doesn't want to be mentioned for fear of these freaks. (And not an unfounded fear at that.)

AnonymousArmy of course denies he was responsible for the "Jason Jew Leopold" post.

Hello blog guy. I was just sent this link by a seixon fan who saw that dear Jason was up to no good again.

Anyway If you want to email me and ask me any questions it's at [redacted].com. The same address Leopold uses when he pretends to be me but can never respond from.

The whole Jew hate is particularly vile but since his goal is to get me banned at kos I expect nothing less.

Okay, not necessarily big shakes there. But here's where Larry Johnson comes in. By the way-- what the hell is a go-to MSM "intelligence expert" doing trolling at the Daily Kos, anyway?

He fell flat with his dod/dia attempt, he is getting Johnson to call me a diebold plant now..

[Larry Johnson's response to Anonymous Army:]

AnonymousArmy Shill for Diebold (4+ / 1-)

When will KOS blow the whistle on this scumbag? He hides behind a false email address. Yet, when you check out the servers he has used they trace back to Diebold. Hmmmmm, you think the boy has an agenda?

by L C Johnson on Mon Jul 24, 2006 at 08:51:51 PM EDT

That's here.

Now, is there anything to Larry Johnson's charge of a Diebold IP? Here's the unfortunate thing: I can't tell. AnnonymousArmy says he tried to post on my stie, but was blocked by the spam-filters. So he didn't post. So I don't have his IP. I can see addresses in his email, but they all come through the email servers, and tell me nothing at all.

I'll ask him to post tomorrow, so I can verify he's posting from Toronto, where he says he lives. Obviously, it would be a long commute from Toronto to Diebold.

Moving on:

...and still no result. So [someone's] desperate and now posts "f@#$ Kos" comments in my name and other things on right leaning sites hoping to convince someone to ban me.

He went to bed before he could clarify who this someone was.

The amazing part is this is ALL revenge. Even Leopold isn't deluded enough to think having me banned from kos is somehow going to save his thrice-ruined career.

And, while I may be the biggest pain in these liars' asses I'm hardly the only lefty trying to weed the garden of frauds and phonies.

I never got to the Larry Johnson angle in my interview with Seixon today; time was too short. Let me correct that by quoting Seixon, and, along the way, the thug-pimp Larry Johnson:

Perhaps most haunting was the email I received from Larry Johnson last night. He claimed I defamed him and called him a liar. I did not defame him and he did lie to me when he said that he had answered my questions when he had in fact not done so. This was not part of the story I wrote yesterday, calling him a liar for that, I simply stated the fact that he declined to answer a set of yes/no questions I posed to him, as he responded that he had already answered them, which was false.

Johnson laced the email, to a personal account of mine which I do not usually give out and which is not available through Google, with personal details about my family and me. Just like Leopold had done, Johnson repeated my mother’s name, my parents’ address, and even my birth month and year. Obviously Johnson thought this would freak me out and scare me into retracting everything. He concluded the email with:

I am willing to accept a written apology and move on. If you refuse to retract your statements about me I am prepared to ratchet this up several levels. I have not spent the last twenty years working with the U.S. military and the intelligence community to accept this kind of nonsense from a wet-nosed 24 year old coward, who is an armchair warrior but does not have the courage to enlist in the military when his country is at war.

By the way, Larry Johnson enjoys saying people he disagrees with have never served, even when it's quite obviously untrue. But I digress.

Is that a threat, Mr. Johnson? After I responded, he fired back with this:

I know where you are living. You forget that I do work for the European Union and friends in Interpol. I've offered you a mature way to deal with this situation. You're obviously too immature and inexperienced to recognize the offer for what it is. Too bad.

Is Larry Johnson using his law enforcement contacts to dig up information on me to intimidate me into retracting uncomfortable facts about his involvement with peddling false allegations against a commenter at my blog? Sheesh. So who was the one who dug up everything? Was it John Dean? Was it Leopold? Was it Johnson? Obviously Johnson has the most resources to do such things, as he so aptly says himself.

Trying to scare someone by lacing an email filled with personal details about them and their family is a “mature� way of handling business?

[Emphasis added to all Larry Johnson quotes above.]

And why is Larry Johnson, scary-important ex-CIA agent, spending so much of his time defending Jason Leopold, anyhow? Leopold doesn't seem to be able to hold a straight media job. And maybe for good reason. He's had a long series of "scoops" about the Plame case that apparently no one else could apparently verify.

I am slapping myself in the head now that I dwelled upon some ridiculous forged email when Seixon's had Larry Fucking Johnson threatening him via email.

As I said, Seixon is the one to watch today. He didn't get to bed until 8 am or so Norway time due to the events of the night; but he will post at some point. I'll keep my eye on the site, and you probably should too.

Why is the MSM not interested in Larry Fucking Johnson threatening amateur journalists?

They scream bloody murder when Bush says a bad word about them, crying a threat to the press. But this pig seems to be suggesting he could either inflict physical harm on Seixon or somehow pull strings to get the cops to harrass him; is this not a story the media cares about?

Are they simply going to keep inviting him on as an expert and never ask about his burgeoning career threatening "24 year old cowards"?

But the story today will be about... well, who knows who. There are, actually, a couple of possibilities; it isn't necessarily Leopold, or even Dean. It could just be someone else in Jason Leopold's TruthOut freakshow.

While I've been talking about bullshit, all this has been going on. I haven't seen this stuff linked; I only heard about it a couple of days ago from a columnist in an email exchange. I just don't understand how this has been missed by so many.

How did this get such little attention, and how has Seixon been left to fend with so little moral support against these thugs?

I'm sorry, Seixon. I just really didn't know.

Semi-Related: Hitchens destroys Joe Wilson's claims -- what's left of them, anyhow.

PS, Glenn E. Greenwald: Have you, by any chance, gotten around to condemning any of this?

Or is condemning just something for little people -- you know, those who don't have New York Times bestellers, or a meteoric nine-month rise in the blogosphere, or a whole legion of adoring housemates with names tending to begin with your middle initial singing your praises to the world?

posted by Ace at 02:47 AM

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