Charles Johnson’s disenchantment with a movement he did much to create is more likely a function of his contrary nature than his active conscience, but it would be ungracious to pry overmuch. The sad truth is that the self-proclaimed anti-jihadists, as a group, have done a great deal to discredit themselves in the past decade.

One thing I left on the cutting room floor, but tried to imply with some context and references, was just how comfortable Johnson was back in 2004, 2005 and 2006 with the people he is now crusading against.

It made sense, and to an extent it was the function of the “everybody on board” mentality that gripped the political blogospheres before the collapse of the Bush presidency. But it’s striking reading Johnson’s old posts now. From November 9, 2004, reacting to the banning of far-right Dutch Belgian party Vlaams Blok:

While it’s hard to approve of every one of Vlaams Blok’s policies, there’s also no denying that this is very much a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups such as the openly radical, terror-supporting Arab-European League—because almost no one else opposes them.

From February 11, 2006:

Atlas Shrugs is a year old today! Happy blogoversary, Pamela.

From July 17, 2006:

Atlas Shrugs has great coverage and lots of photographs of the Stand With Israel Rally in New York City.

From November 18, 2007:

Tonight’s recommended book is Robert Spencer’s detailed, relentlessly factual comparison of Islam and Christianity, examining the history and the ideologies behind the question: Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t.

UPDATE: Johnson links, and points out one error (which I’ve corrected) while arguing that his friendly comments about some people he’s now shunned were “from a different time” and fairly innocuous. All the same, it’s interesting to read those old posts and get a sense of how much that side of the blogosphere has changed.

Charles Johnson (YouTube)

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie — who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call “St. Pancake,” a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled “anti-Jihadist” blogosphere — from “moonbat” (“an unthinking or insane leftist”) to “anti-idiotarian” (“anyone who grasps the significance of and does his or her best to combat the post-9/11 political alliance between the ‘Old Left’ and militant Islam”).

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right — including conservative bloggers, critics of Islamic extremism, and critics of Islam in general who used to be Johnson’s fellow travelers.

Johnson has blasted Fox News host Glenn Beck, promoting a video from a Beck-inspired party that shows conservatives ranting about evolution and arguing that “this turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP.” In response to the news that the Department of Homeland Security was watching for increased right-wing extremism — something that most of the conservative blogosphere, like most Republicans, responded to with angry ridicule — Johnson pointed to the recent arrests of right-wing terrorists and criticized bloggers for buying into “distorted claims” about the DHS report. When Obama genuflected before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Johnson found archival video of President Bush bowing to take a medal from the King and urged conservatives to turn down their “hyperventilating nonsense.”

This has the blogger’s peers asking themselves the same question, over and over: What the heck happened to Charles Johnson?

“I don’t think I’ve changed,” Johnson said. “I’ve always been pretty independent. This is something I’ve really tried to put out there on my blog. I don’t consider myself right-wing.”

It sounds strange coming from a blogger who played an underrated role in forcing CBS News to back down from its 2004 story on President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and whose first reaction to Obama’s election in November — after a quick post congratulating him — was to note that the Muslim Brotherhood, “the world’s largest jihadist organization,” was pleased.

Johnson supported Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, but he spent some of the campaign attacking anti-Obama conspiracy theorists, and he rejected the idea   designs were malicious, rather than merely naive. Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

Johnson’s disgust with the terrorism-focused conservative blogosphere has had a traumatic effect on a dogged and dogmatic community of bloggers and scholars. When Johnson began blogging about Islam and terrorism after 9/11, he inspired untold other supporters of an aggressive war on terror to start their own Websites, link up, and push back against “Dhimmitude” — organizations and foreign policy decision makers that were “soft” on terrorism. Now, some of his followers have started blogs that track Johnson’s “madness,” while a video that portrays Johnson as Adolf Hitler going mad in his bunker makes the rounds.

“He’s the reason I started blogging,” said Atlas Shrugs editor Pamela Geller, a New Yorker who says she was “mugged by Sept. 11″ and started reading LGF for news and fellowship. “I wrote birthday messages to him. I respected and admired him.”

Robert Spencer, the director of JihadWatch and the author of the bestselling, “Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,” had an established career as a critic of militant Islam before he met Johnson. “But right after 9/11, he was the only one out there reporting on this,” Spencer said. “He built my Website. I learned how to blog from reading his stuff.”

Johnson has turned hard against Spencer and Geller, attacking the former for joining a “genocidal Facebook group,” while referring to the latter as a “shrieking lunatic,” and labeling both of them “hatebloggers.” Johnson now points to Geller’s posts about Barack Obama’s heritage and her quest to fund a headstone for the victim of a Muslim honor killing as proof that “the woman is deranged.” Other bloggers in the movement have been purged from Johnson’s blogroll or pilloried on the site, never to be mentioned again. The most successful sites that arose in LGF’s wake, including Gateway Pundit, Gates of Vienna, and Brussels Journal, are also on the outs.

While Johnson’s own blog was a launchpad for the movement and his comment sections have often been a place for anti-Muslim and anti-liberal rage — one Web quiz lets users guess whether a quote comes from “Little Green Footballs or Late German Fascists” — Johnson believes that LGF is now policed for fringe activity. “A lot of the people most responsible for causing our bad reputation are now gone,” he said. “I wrote all the backend software, and I have ways of cleaning up the site.”

Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for a Counterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom (now the International Civil Liberties Alliance), an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.

“It was the best conference I ever went to,” remembered Geller. But the summit included members of Vlaams Belang, a controversial Belgian political party that criticizes Islam and Shariah law, and had been attacked within the Netherlands for its connections to extremism and racism. Johnson went to work exposing this, and the attendees reeled from the negative attention.

“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU, even those who have no anti-Semitic tendencies.”

“Not only that,” said Bodissey, “he made it harder for certain American anti-jihad groups to raise funds if they failed to repudiate his designated ‘fascist-enablers’ like us.”

Johnson is unapologetic about his actions. While he was attacking the attendees of the Counterjihad Summit, he was also blasting Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) for taking money from, and being photographed with, the owner of the extremist Web site Stormfront.org.

“Some people at that summit in Belgium were not people we should have been associated with,” Johnson said, pointing out that since 2007 the terrorism-focused conservative bloggers have become supporters of Dutch politician Geert Wilders , who wants to outlaw Islam in his country. “Some of these people outright want to ban Islam from the United States, which I think is crazy, completely nuts. That’s not something we do in this country. These people will outright defend banning the Koran or deporting Muslims. That’s popular with the Geller/Spencer crowd.”

When they talk about Johnson today, the rest of the terrorism-focused bloggers alternate between anger and regret. He has smeared them, they say, and according to Dymphna he’s “destroyed a lot of networking that was beginning to emerge” between American and European critics of Islamic extremism. “He’s really gone off the deep end,” Geller said, pointing to Johnson’s more and more frequent criticisms of creationists, such as the attack on the anti-evolution, Glenn Beck-inspired event, which made the host angry enough to lash out at LGF on his show. “He’s a leftist blogger now.”

Johnson brushes that criticism aside. “A lot of people think I discovered this creationism thing overnight,” he said, “but that’s not true. I was posting about this before 9/11. After 9/11 I had other things on my mind. And now I’ve come back to it.” But Spencer accuses Johnson of losing sight of the threat of extremist Islam by obsessing over the American religious right and equating the two faiths.

“There is no global movement of Christians trying to subjugate the world,” Spencer said. “There is such a movement on the extreme of Islam. I wrote a book called ‘Religion of Peace’ — which Johnson wrote a favorable review of — and I looked, and didn’t find, Christian extremists who were trying to replace the Constitution with Biblical law. They’re a myth. They’re the Santa Claus of the left.”

Some of Johnson’s former allies experienced a decrease in traffic numbers when he started attacking them, but they all now feel they’ve recovered from the break. “LGF tried to destroy my reputation so I wouldn’t have the access I have to my sources in law enforcement and academia,” said Spencer, “but that hasn’t happened.”

Geller has rebounded with increased prominence — she was a guest on the Fox News show “Red Eye” last week — and she said she has survived the “besmirching” of her reputation and she now fills the information-spreading role that Johnson once did. “I get my stuff from people on the inside,” she said, “from people in Europe. I field 800-900 emails a day. We all depend on our readers for these tips. That’s where Charles was getting his stuff. And now he’s cracked and he’s not getting that anymore.”

Johnson brushes off that kind of criticism. LGF is his site, and if it has to name names and shame the people who are debasing the movement against extremist Islam, he’ll do it. “I’ve definitely seen an uptick in craziness since the election,” he sighs. “Well, I don’t know if Geller got crazier. She always was nuts.”

That’s sort of an overstatement.

There is, indeed, a viral movement afoot to stage protests against President Obama’s spending plans. They are really very small protests. The largest “tea party” Facebook group has a bit less than 3000, and it’ll probably pass that, but many members belong to other smaller “tea party” groups.

Look, I covered the Ron Paul campaign for more than a year, from his launch in early 2007 to his “vote for some third party candidate” press conference. I waded through crowds at Paul rallies that drew 4000 people, ten times the size of any “tea party” we’ve seen so far.

This isn’t to say that the “tea parties” will never, ever take off. Just that it’s quite easy to get attention for an anti-government cause, especially in the blog era, and easy to forget that it doesn’t really matter politically.

FLEISCHER: There are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.

O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it “Siberia.” And I told the president, “Don’t call on Siberia.”

You’d never know that Stein asked (and elevated) a question that the White House had been dodging, about whether it supported “truth and reconciliation” prosecutions of former Bush officials. You’d think Stein had asked about Alex Rodriguez or something. Nope: That was the Washington Post.

If we on active duty don’t get engaged effectively with new media, and I don’t mean by “information prevention” methods, then we cede any relevant arguments to whoever actually shows up and is effective. Worse, we could shut down the “forceful backup” we should be getting and wind up with silly decisions that cost a lot or drive the sailors crazy.

Not long ago I had an interesting colloquy with a senior Army officer who was trying to understand how I could consider myself both a reporter and a blogger. A lot of his argument boiled down to noting that I don’t do my job the way The Washington Post does: I aggregate other people’s reporting, add my own, and also add analysis, even opinion. It was frustrating to hear that this was considered somehow illegitimate. But later in the back-and-forth it occurred to me that I didn’t do a very good job making a case for the merits of my style of reporting as a way to inform the public. So it just goes to show you this is a two-way street and people should leave themselves open to new arguments.

1.) James S. Robbins, “Giving Up on Guantánamo” (National Review, 1/23/09)
A representative take, from the right, on the closing of Gitmo as “domestic political grandstanding, and a present to the terrorists and their sympathizers, who can claim victory over the United States.”

2.) Dick Morris, “The Obama Presidency: Here Comes Socialism” (The Hill, 1/21/09)
A good sum-up of the most hair-pulling conservative fears about the new president.

3.) Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), “A Jobs Plan That Will Work” (The State, 1/22/09)
An economic program from the hard-right senator.

4.) Michael Gerson, “Two Faces of Obamania” (The Washington Post, 1/23/09)
The former Bush speechwriter expresses outrage at giddy enthusiasm for the new president.

5.) Daniel McCarthy, “Getting Reagan Right” (The American Conservative, 1/26/09 issue)
An argument against mindless worship of the ex-president, and for some historical understanding.

6.) John Ridley, “PC Whiners Aside, Downey Jr. Deserves His Oscar Nod” (Big Hollywood, 1/23/09)
A compelling argument for Tropic Thunder’s acting nomination.

7.) Abigail Thernstrom, “One Journey Ends” (The New York Post, 1/21/09)
The conservative civil rights historian credits Obama with ending the modern age of racial grievance.

So it’s surprising when Daily Kos diarist EmperorHadrian hinges off a blithe line in the First Read story — “some critics says [sic] he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention” — and says “as far as we know, Kappes has not objected to the torture policies he enabled.”

Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation.

The most serious charge against Kappes, as best I can tell, comes from his role in the abduction and rendition of Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric taken by the CIA off the streets of Milan and tortured in Egypt. A 2007 article from The Chicago Tribune about the rendition reports briefly that Kappes was “one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar abduction.” (h/t TalkLeft.) No doubt that’s troubling. Extraordinary rendition is legally and morally problematic. Italy is prosecuting in absentia the CIA agents involved in the Abu Omar rendition.

But we really don’t know from what’s publicly available the context of Kappes’ decision. Was this something that his bosses demanded? Did he have decision-making authority on the rendition? (The Chicago Tribune piece is extremely complex, as much of this is murky.) What were the alternatives to handling Abu Omar? What did or didn’t Kappes know? I’m not saying this is exculpatory, necessarily. I’m saying that we should investigate before we reach a conclusion.

More broadly, though, there’s a tendency in the blogosphere to presume that the Google-able corpus of knowledge on torture is a definitive account of our government’s dalliance with it over the last decade or so. That’s just not the case.

The frustrating thing about intelligence reporting is just how dense and murky and opaque it is, and very few people who do it are able to create comprehensive accounts of what goes on. That’s why it’s necessary to hedge conclusions. A piece I’ve chased for years concerns internal CIA resistance to torture. I’ve confirmed very little of it, which is why I’ve not yet published anything. But if it pans out, I think it’s fair to say that it would complicate much of the picture of what people inside the agency did and didn’t resist, and how and why they did it.

This is partially why I keep calling for an independent congressionally-mandated investigation. There’s just too much that’s unknown to label individual CIA people torturers as a general proposition, so take it easy on that front. Reality-based community and all that.

When asked by a reporter why he did not personally call for Blagojevich to step down, a move Obama’s staff yesterday said he supports, Obama criticized the “tradition where people view politics as a business,” before saying he hopes the governor will resign.

I do not think that the governor, at this point, can effectively serve the people of Illinois. The legislature is going down to Springfield to make a determination as to how to resolve this issue. I think they’re going to come to the same conclusion. I hope that the governor himself comes to the conclusion that he can no longer effectively serve, and he does resign.

Obama reaffirmed that he had not spoken to Blagojevich about the appointment to fill his vacated Senate seat and pledged to provide details of all contact his transition staff had with Blagojevich’s office in the coming days.

I had no contact with the governor’s office. I did not speak to the governor about these issues, that I know for certain. What I want to do is to gather all the facts about any staff contacts that may have taken place between the transition office and the governor’s office, and we’ll have those in the next few days and we’ll present them. But what I’m absolutely certain about is that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat. That, I’m absolutely certain of, and that would be a violation of everything this campaign has been about. That’s not how we do business.

Obama also said he has not been contacted by federal investigators on the matter.

While Obama addressed the issue more forcefully than he has to date, chattering about “What did Obama know?” which is already mostly limited to Republican circles and the conservative blogosphere, will likely persist at least until the transition releases information about any meetings with the governor’s staff.

That sort of thing doesn’t usually happen in the typical workplace. But for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, it became a reality just after Sen. John McCain picked her as his running mate. Her allowance for clothes, hair and makeup, and for outfits for her family, came courtesy of the Republican National Committee. It’s already the talk of the blogosphere, with some disgusted Republican operatives voicing complaints about spending that kind of money when campaign funds are tight and the economy is a mess.

But let’s hold on. It’s not cheap to look good. Palin couldn’t just hightail it to Wal-Mart. As Joy Behar pointed out on “The View,” Palin can’t shoot her clothes anymore; she’s got to shop for them.

And so, put yourself in her shoes. Like these $595 Manolo Blahniks, the leather high-heel halter pair, in black.

Let’s say you go to Niemanmarcus.com and click on “wear to work.” Up pops “9 to 5 Essentials for Every Working Girl.” The first thing to cross your mind: What working girls are they talking about? Joe Six-Pack types couldn’t afford this stuff. Joe the Plumber could, though, with his six-figure salary.

Moving on, you select the Tahari two-piece dress set, in a fetching shade of purple. That’s $528. Add the Gucci Swing High Heel Mary Jane shoes, for another $575. You’ll need some decent jewelry, and there’s nothing more fitting for a Republican than pearls. You choose the David Yurman Ivory Pearl and Diamond Stud pair for $950. You haven’t even gotten yet to the high-waisted Spanx ($38), plus the hair and makeup. And that’s for just one outfit. And it doesn’t even include some of the higher-priced designer pieces.

Yes, Palin wore an eye-catching red leather jacket to one event, and you can see from this that it probably set her back a least a few thousand dollars. Add up the price of a few of these outfits, plus clothes for her husband and some of her children, and you can see how quickly you get to $150,000.

As a dissenting reader pointed out to Andrew Sullivan, there’s a double standard here, and anyone who went to the high school prom knows what it is. McCain can wear the same black suit to every event, and no one cares. Palin has to look the part.

But the problem for Palin isn’t really the money spent on the clothes. Voters who are shopping savvy might not be too outraged, or even surprised, by the amount. It’s more the question of what part, exactly, Palin is trying to play, as she dresses herself.

If you portray yourself as the common-sense-minded, former small-town mayor, holder of values above and beyond those of the elite, you don’t look so good slapping the plastic around at Nieman’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, whether it’s your money or not.

If you talk to James Dobson about God watching over you in this election, you have to be intimately familiar with church teachings on materialism and excess — and somehow, a $75,000 shopping spree doesn’t fit.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gets away with Armani suits because she makes no apology for them, and they do not contradict the image of power she wants to convey. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke openly of her disdain for the time she had to spend on hair and makeup, getting ready for events. For her, it was all part of the game.

In Palin’s case, the clothes, in a sense, don’t make the woman. She dresses like the elites she disdains, clothes herself in the uniform of what she considers the opposition and then tears into their values with a smile outlined in Chantecaille.