intense, emotional and often irrational

in his column today, tully gets in a dig at gary welsh:

[I]t also was an example of the intense, emotional and often irrational reaction to all things Obama.

One local blogger, for instance, could fill a book (though not a very good one) with his many entries railing on the goofy presidential birth certificate issue. And my voice mail fills with messages you wouldn't want your mother to hear each time I dare write Obama's name.

let's see... "intense, emotional and often irrational". yeah, that description fits gary pretty accurately. but something else that's well-known about gary is that he can't stand criticism. even mild criticism drives him up the wall and causes him to lash out, often with comic effect. so as you might imagine, being criticized in the star has gary fuming. he whines:

I have performed countless hours of legal research in my spare time and devoted many posts over the past year trying to inform the readers of this blog what the real issue is about so people can understand what Tully wants to reduce to "goofy presidential birth certificate." People approach me on the street and e-mail me constantly thanking me for better informing me on this issue so they understand what's its all about. They are angry at guys like Tully in the mainstream media who only mention it in the most derisive way without putting context to it or making any effort to explain the issue.

ah, so gary is simply a hard-working blogger, working to inform people that if you read the constitution while wearing logic-impairing goggles, you can come to absurd conclusions. all he's doing is explaining the controversy! but of course, this description doesn't really match what gary has actually written.

in his most recent birther post, posted on friday—yes, he still posts birther stuff multiple times a week—gary warned of "the real danger that the United States will cease to exist as a constitutional republic".

the birther post before that, two days earler, is riddled with supposed "evidence" that obama's COLB is a forgery, and lavishes praise on pamela geller, a prominent proponent of the born-in-kenya theory.

three days before that he was gleefully quoting at length from an NRO article that referred to obama as a "marxist" and suggested, among other things, that obama is indeed a muslim, that he was to blame for genocide in kenya, and that "the real reason Obama doesn't want the original birth certificate released" is that it would show that his name isn't actually barack obama. (this, despite simultaneously acknowledging that the information on the COLB "is identical to that in the state's records, the so-called vault copy". gary isn't worried about consistency here.)

two days before that he was complaining that his oh-so-reasonable constitutional argument was being lumped together with those crazy birthers who say obama was born in kenya. (hey gary, maybe the reason you get lumped in with those people is that you continue to promote them on your blog?) in that post, he also claimed that "the reason someone like Matt Tully doesn't have the stomach to stick his neck out on an issue like this" is because tully doesn't want to accused of racial bigotry—as gary is regularly—and not because tully thinks the "issue" is laughable.

all that in just the past two weeks! believe me, i could keep going—gary welsh is totally obsessed with his irrational loathing of our first black president. and he eagerly latches on to every negative story about obama he hears—even the ones he claims not to believe, like the idea that obama was born in kenya. (i'm sure you all remember when gary was flogging the story about obama having coked-up limousine sex with a white felon named larry sinclair. he doesn't talk about that so much anymore; the birther stuff gets him more page views.)

gary tries to present himself as a lonely truth-teller, one of the few brave souls willing to admit that the emperor has no clothes. in reality, he's more like a paparazzo, pointing his camera up the emperor's robes in hopes of snapping a photo of imperial undies. but unlike paparazzi, who harass and annoy for a paycheck, gary does it out of pure spite, because like rush limbaugh, he wants obama to fail. and he rationalizes it all by formulating conspiracy theories about why the objects of his hate deserve it: obama is a deceiver, a non-citizen, on the DL, corrupt, secretly smoking cigarettes despite having said he quit.

it's a shame, really, because gary's a fairly intelligent guy and capable of doing good work. but he's also vain, paranoid, and incapable of admitting mistakes, and that tarnishes what could be a really good blog. the result is a blog that's half-rational and half-crackpot—and therefore impossible to take seriously.

gary complains about ad-hominem attacks being used against him, but people wouldn't use them so much if he didn't make it so easy. after all, this is the guy who believed that julia carson practiced voodoo. it's damn hard to take someone like that seriously. ¶