House of Cards

I've long held, as you see above, that "liberalism is a persistent vegetative state," but at no point could I ever have predicted that it was as inbred and corrupt as the story unfolding around Sexion, an American blogger living Norway, seems to indicate.

The entire sordid situation is too bizarre for me to accurately replicate, so I'll send you to Matthew Sheffield's explanation of events as they are currently understood.

Read it.

Seriously.

Because if you don't, the rest of this post won't make any sense.

Apparently, disgraced journalistic fraud and technorati-addicted freak Jason Leopold (hi Jason, yes I see you, go stalk someone else), several of Leopold's sockpuppet identities, ex-CIA Joe Wilson defender (man what a bad time for that) and former media darling Larry Johnson, and Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story (the liberal "Drudge Report") are all involved in a bizarre web of... well, I'm not exactly sure. But it involves fake sock puppet identities, attempts to discredit a Daily Kos diarist and Seixon, allegations of a conspiracy theory, and what appear to be threats against Seixon and his family by Johnson.

Read this post by Ace, and follow the whole bizarre thing at Seixon's blog.

Jason Leopold, a disgraced journalist with a history of admitted mental illness and drug addiction, allegedly created (and seems to presently create) false identities and false emails to attempt to discredit critics on the Internet. His former colleague at Raw Story, Larisa Alexandrovna, jumps in supporting these attempts to discredit at least one of these critics. A former CIA and State Department Counter-terrorism official, Larry Johnson, loyal to all things Joe Wilson, is apparently threatening bloggers and their families across international borders.

"crosspatch" offers a plausible explanation for these attacks in the comments of Sexion's latest post:

What it seems to be is that their whole community is based on faith. For example, that Bush "stole" the elections in 2000 and 2004 is a fundamental principle in their world. Now they have no actual proof of this and this is all based on a plausible scenario. When you begin to expose people like Jason as liars or catch them making thigs up or spreading falsehoods, it risks bringing down their entire community they have so carefully built and nurtured. In other words, what you are doing is speaking heresey. You must be attacked and run off so that you don't "poison the minds" of other believers. But unlike the rank and file "believers" people like Larry are in the college of cardinals on their religion. They have a great deal to lose. People like Johnson, Wilson, Dean, Kos, et al have much to lose if people don't believe their scenarios anymore. If people stop believing that Rove controls the world and that Rumsfeld is dictating Israeli military strategy, then their entire little empire is lost and they are no longer celebrities as their own status is reduced.

[snip]

You are being treated this way because you are a threat to Larry's status and all the "plausible scenarios" that have been trotted out to support the community that shares those beliefs. Fact is their enemy when it is at odds with their beliefs.

An interesting hypothesis.

Not surprisingly, this same comment would describe the motive for Glenn Greenwald's alleged sock puppetry and his reputed recent, after-the-fact "evidence tampering."

What do these liberal luminaries—Jason Leopold, Glenn Greenwald, Larry Johnson, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame—and the rest of the "reality-based" machine have to lose if their house of cards falls apart?

Quite a lot, from several angles.

Financially, Greenwald, Wilson, and Plame all have current or future books whose success obviously hinges on the credibility of author.

Larry Johnson has quite the media career going for himself, with many appearances in major international media, but if his credibility is damaged or he is shown to be unstable(which seems to be a developing story), his media spotlight would quickly dim, and his value to BERG Associates would certainly diminish.

Likewise, (writer) Leopold's Truthout and (editor) Alexandrovna's Raw Story, leftists news sites with already questionable credibility, have much to loose if their writers and editors are caught as frauds, or show that they can be easily duped.

Of course, the much larger picture, which "crosspatch" correctly identified, is that if these and other central figures in the "reality-based" community are exposed as charlatans and dupes, then an entire series of allegations that form the potential base of growth for the progressive moment falls apart.

This is going to be fun to watch.