troll

A favorite practice of the Pajamofascist set is, when faced with a losing argument, to publish your advesary's home contact information on line.  Michelle Malkin was a pioneer in this innovatively thuggish means of silencing opposing view-points as we discussed here the other night.   She puts the information out there and her ghoulish readers do the rest, placing harassing phone calls, sending death threats, and performing the same job as Ann Coulter's "little Nazi block-watchers".  "Citizen advocates" my green scaly ass.

After having her own contact information "outed" on the web in retaliation for her calling out the flying monkeys on a group of pacifist college students, Malkin herself moved house and henceforth disavowed the practice of "outing".  (Funny how that shoe feels on the other foot, isn't it, Michelle?)  But, that doesn't mean that her followers and advocates have taken the same approach.

For those of you just joining us, there is an unholy trinity of Right Wing bloggers whose crimes against civil discourse and respect for privacy are second only to their crimes against the English language.  They write, in the words of Thers from Whiskey Ashes, "like they wear their 18th century wigs powdered in the purest cocaine".

Who are these three lock-stepping American brownshirts?  They go by the names of "Tacitus" (Josh Trevino), "Patterico" (Patrick Frey), and "Paste-Eater" (Jeff Goldstein).  All three of them have been involved at some point in threatening to publish (or in the actual publication) of liberal opponents' contact information.  Patterico noisily threatened TBogg last fall.  Goldstein went so far as to publish Thers from Whiskey Ashes' real name and home contact information, giving his readers something to do with the time each day that they aren't spending whacking off in their moms' basements and scouring AP photos for signs of Photoshop "kerning".  Goldstein's readers deluged Thers with hate mail and threats, and one found a photograph of Thers's infant daughter and opined charmingly that she had "dick-sucker lips".

And now, Trevino (now a paid Wingnut Welfare recipient at the Claremont Institute), who at one point anointed himself the arbiter of "Online Integrity" (a doomed-from-the-outset effort to rope bloggers on both sides into signing a document that assured that they would never engage in the kind of personal smears and information-outing that Trevino himself made famous) has now trained his toy light saber on Retardo Montalbaln (aka HTML Mencken) of Sadly, No! because Retardo published this photo:

 tacitus

That photo of Tacitus was taken on his wedding day.  He is a purportedly grown man, yes, playing with a Star Wars toy in front of God and everybody at his own wedding.  How do we know it was his wedding day?  Because it was published with a bunch of other photos in Trevino's public Flikr account.

Tacitus/Trevino has taken this as his cue to clamber up on what has to be the World's Shortest High Horse, claiming that photo was stolen and that the publication of pictures from his wedding (by someone other than himself) has endangered him and his family.

Shyeah, whatever.

However, he is now using this as an excuse to "out" the personal information of Retardo/Mencken, who lives in a very conservative area of rural Arkansas, and could very well be placed in immediate danger by having his political affiliation known and broadcast to the four corners of teh Internets.   It's typical of the bully tactics of the Right, very typical.  What these men can't accomplish in real life, they send out their legions of lunk-headed fans to do and therefore absolve themselves of blame.

Why, that sounds an awful lot like the kind of tactics BushCo is so enamored of.  How do you suppose the august fellows of The Claremont Institute feel about one of their own resorting to this kind of bullying and intimidation? 

But that's a different story.

Trevino, Frey, and Goldstein are all terribly mediocre writers (and that's being kind) and apparently watching their Beautiful NeoCon Dream of a cake-walk in Iraq and a thousand years of Republican hegemony go up in flames isn't doing good things to their heads.  They're becoming increasingly shrill and nonsensical and are lashing out, and given that none of them are going to win any awards for being paragons of mental and emotional stability, it's probably going to get uglier before they each respectively go postal and publish a big "Goodbye Cruel Internet" post and go silent for a week or two, then reappear under a new URL and proceed to make asses of themselves in hitherto inconceivable ways.

And for the record, we at FDL don't want ANY of you going over there and sticking pointy sticks through the cages to see what kind of funny squawking noises these crazies will make.  They're not right in the head and picking on them is being needlessly cruel to a group of guys who either don't know any better or can't help themselves, so let it go.  We're not going to publish their contact information or urge you to spam their blogs with angry comments because, frankly, we're better than that.  We'll leave those kinds of harassments and intimidation techniques to them.  Apparently it's all they have left.

Good luck, Retardo!  We're all pulling for you.