Donald Douglas of the popular conservative blog American Power wrote a post on Friday in regards to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, American Spectator contributor and blogger Robert Stacy McCain, and myself. Unlike McCain, who prefers to summarize my various assertions in his own words and who is in the habit of excerpting our e-mail exchanges without including the more important portions of my responses, Douglas actually provides his readers with a lengthy excerpt of my most recent post, which is good of him. Still, I believe that he may not be as informed on this matter as he believes himself to be.
I had noted, for instance, that the conservative blogger Patterico (Patrick Frey) characterized one of McCain's past comments regarding interracial marriage to be "indefensible." Douglas responds to that portion of my post as follows:
Yeah. Indefensible. And Patrick claims he's not out to smear Robert Stacy McCain, nor is he "walking anything back." He's "just a guy with a web site, giving his opinions." Well, if so, he's certainly aligning pretty tightly with the rest of these smear-merchants.
I would say that he's not aligning with us very tightly at all. Charles Johnson and myself, along with a couple of other "smear-merchants" such as Holocaust researcher Sergei Romanov, have been unambiguous in our respective characterizations of McCain as a white supremacist, as we see the totality of the evidence to be similarly unambiguous.
Patrick Frey, meanwhile, has been exceedingly ambiguous. He has not come out and called McCain a racist, for instance, whereas I call McCain a racist some two dozen times before breakfast, while Charles Johnson recently got a tattoo on the small of his back that reads "R.S. McCain Wrote an Article For the White Supremacist Publication American Renaissance" in Chinese characters. In contrast, Frey has spenta great deal of time in analyzing a couple of the less damning charges. Though he is admirable to have looked into at least a couple of accusations with such care, and though he is certainly correct in deeming some of McCain's race-oriented writings to be not necessarily indicative of any racist world view taken by themselves, I would point out that he still has a bit of work to do if he wants to make an informed decision. If Frey were to spend an additional ten minutes in reading a couple of the pieces that Johnson and I have written in explanation of our more significant charges, I believe that he would have difficulty coming to any conclusion other than that McCain is indeed the white supremacist that we have deemed him to be. He need only Google McCain's name to find these articles; he could also look through my archives at True/Slant or Johnson's at Little Green Footballs.
Douglas goes on to write the following:
I know R.S. McCain's addressed the bulk of these charges at his blog -- and I'm not in the habit of following along all that closely.
Clearly he's not, as McCain has done no such thing - rather, he has addressed a few of the less convincing accusations while ignoring the most important of them. Douglas is in no position to know what the "bulk of these charges" may be, having almost certainly not read more than one or two of the dozen or so pieces that I have written on the subject and having probably not bothered to spend much time reading through the even more extensive array of posts that Johnson has written, either; if he did, he would most likely have chosen to remain quiet.
"Smear-merchants," incidentally, is an interesting term to apply to myself and Johnson in this case, and I invite Douglas to point to a single "smear" that I have... uh... merchanted. Perhaps a brief recap is in order.The first piece I wrote on McCain pointed out that in a then-recent blog post, the fellow mocked a study appearing in the journal Reproductive Health for having reached the conclusion that religious teens are more likely to become pregnant than their non-religious counterparts; noting that Henry Tudor was the product of a teen pregnancy, he explained that such things are not necessarily bad (and I agree with him, if not with the ridiculous reasoning he employs in pointing out that a fellow born to a prominent royal family ended up doing pretty well for himself). As it appeared to me that he was defending teen pregnancy not on principle but rather because it had been shown to be a relatively common attribute among his fellow religious believers, I did a bit of Googling, wholly expecting to find that he had elsewhere expressed concern over teen pregnancy in general. What I ended up finding was that he had not only expressed such concerns, but had expressed them specifically in reference to pregnancies among minority teens. Reading both of these blog posts together, one cannot come to any conclusion other than that McCain is fine with teen pregnancies as long as the teens in question are not black and Hispanic, in which case he suddenly forgets all about Henry Tudor and what a fine fellow he grew up to be.
Soon afterwards, it was brought to my attention that Charles Johnson had been accumulating a great deal of additional information on McCain's past writings on race - including an article that McCain had written for American Renaissance under his Confederate-inspired pen name and which dealt with, of course, the dangers of "race suicide" among whites in general and the worrying trend of relatively low white teen birth rates. The fact that he had earlier expressed the exact sentiment that I had originally accused him of holding based on entirely different evidence - and had done so in a white nationalist publication under an assumed name drawn from the iconography of the Confederacy - would, I think, lend a bit of credence to the position I had taken in the first place. And the additional evidence that Charles Johnson and Sergei Romanov and others have uncovered has strengthened the case even further, as one might be inclined to think if one is not Donald Douglas.
It has now been a couple of days since I offered McCain the chance to shoot down both the existing charges as well as the not-yet-public one that I will be making in my book; though he took the time to write two rambling blog posts last week concerning whether or not that book will make money (the last one did) and whether or not Max Blumenthal is much of a writer (I have no idea), he has not even acknowledged the opportunity I have given him to debate me via e-mail in such a way as that he may address the charges in a comprehensive manner. If McCain has convincing explanations and can show my reasoning to be as flawed and dishonest as he claims it to be, he would of course humiliate and discredit me. Nor has he taken me up on my offer to include anything he'd like to write on this subject or any other, to be included as-is within the chapter that concerns him. If he has the facts on his side and is capable of employing them, he can thus reveal me to be a fraud in my very own book.
McCain has not been shy about engaging me in the past. The first reference he made to me was in the comments section of the blog Protein Wisdom, on which occasion he proclaimed, "Barrett Brown: He'll get his in turn," this of course being true but irrelevant. He has since composed a good number of blog posts on the subject of my wholesale perfidy, invariably noting in goofy and derogatory language that I serve as spokesperson for a political action committee dedicated to advancing the Establishment Clause and assisting atheist candidates. But since making my latest offer, I have not yet received a response. This same offer has since been referenced by both Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Donald Douglas of American Power - two fellows whom McCain knows and reads regularly - and of course it was also sent to McCain by e-mail as well, but still he will not even acknowledge that any such offer has been made.
I again ask McCain to either accept or deny my challenge.