The great Nazi-hunter Charles Johnson bags another

Libelblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is dead and buried as a source that anyone takes seriously -- even the New York Times did a post-mortem -- but Johnson's latest ridiculous discovery of neo-Nazis warrants a revisit to this whole sad affair.

Weasel Zippers has found the comment above, in which Johnson says that he is "fairly sure" that the Tennessee state flag is a neo-Nazi emblem. Johnson himself is seething and whining about this: "the comments that followed minutes later in the same thread...I clearly concluded that the flag was a Tennessee flag."

Well, that's mighty generous and perspicacious of him, but he only did it after speculating about the Tennessee flag's alleged resemblance to various neo-Nazi insignia:

As Glenn Reynolds says, "you know, seeing neo-Nazis behind every bush deserves a bit of mockery."

Yes, and more than mockery. This incident shows that Charles Johnson wouldn't know a neo-Nazi emblem from a lilac bush, and casts yet more doubt on all his sage analyses about alleged neo-Nazis in Europe -- and yet those analyses were widely accepted by people who should have known better. Late in 2007, when Johnson was still a respected conservative blogger, he began to smear Pamela Geller -- the fearless and passionate Zionist and warrior for freedom -- and others as neo-Nazi sympathizers based on this false analysis. And late in 2008, he began including me in these smears. The point is that other prominent conservative bloggers ran for cover and shunned those whom Johnson victimized, instead of standing up to him and calling him on his character assassination and defamation. Johnson was working hard to destroy the reputations of good people, and other bloggers abetted him in this by cowering before him and severing all relations with his targets.

It wasn't until mid-2009 that Johnson's betrayal of all his principles became clear to everyone, and his support among conservatives began to evanesce. But by then, the damage was done. Those who woke up to him then never revisited the decisions they made earlier and asked themselves if maybe his standards of evidence were just as shoddy in 2007 and 2008 as they were in 2009. His smears and lies follow his targets around on the Internet and will do so forever -- and mainstream conservative bloggers who enjoy a great reputation as fearlessly politically incorrect adopted a cowardly silence in 2007 and 2008, and have shown their cowardice yet again more recently in not revising their former stances.

You know who you are!

UPDATE: The good folks at The Blogmocracy were on this first.