That’s a very good question. An easier one is, what doesn’t he know? Answer: when to cut one’s losses and quit when he’s behind. Get a load of his brilliant rejoinder to my entry yesterday, which mocked his moonbattery over Iraq the Model CIA Stunt.

I suppose when you’re far away on the right and receeding [sic] in size rapidly…

Receding in size rapidly? I wish! I hear the Atkins can accomplish that, if it doesn’t kill you in the process. I probably should give Atkins a try, but so far I have been too lazy to do so. Thanks for the attempted compliment, though.

No, wait; he probably wasn’t talking about my physical size. I’ll bet he was referring to my TTLB standings, which have been languishing in Large Mammal territory since April. Like Justene, I really belong in Playful Primate territory, but that’s something only you, the reader can fix. As best I can determine, the Joehard isn’t ranked in the Ecosystem at all, so maybe Technorati makes a better comparison. Right now, I have 675 links from 207 unique sites, while his Joyriding and Martini drinking (hopefully in that order!) sites have 30 from 25 and 11 from 7, respectively. I probably tripled the poor sod’s traffic for the day just by linking to him.

As to the notion that I am “far away” on the right, I suspect Michael Williams will disagree, as will anyone who supports the federal partial-birth abortion ban or Liberty Counsel’s efforts to persuade a federal court to block gay marriage in Massachusetts. Expect similar dissension from the diehard Tomikazes who were not persuaded by my recommendation that they vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger rather than the Real Republican who ran against him in last October’s recall election.

But enough about what I am (or aren’t ain’t, as it were). If I’m nearly as big an asshat as Joseph is, I’m sure he’ll have little trouble establishing that on his blog. Hell, I’ll even throw him a bone and link to it so that more than two or three of his relatives may actually read it. But this here post is about Joseph’s asshattery, not mine.

… someone like me might look like an “ultra-leftist” blogger, even if they are [sic] in truth simply a hypercapitalist and barely slightly paler shade of blue than John McCain.

I wasn’t really thinking about capitalism vs. socialism when I called him an ultra-leftist, as I focusing more on his moonbattery surrounding American foreign policy and the CIA. Some moonbats are staunch capitalists, of course; Reason and the Libertarian Party are full of them. Is Joseph one of those Randian slash libertarian isolationists?

Not exactly. One might expect any “hypercapitalist” who blogs about politics and resides in California – easily one of the most overtaxed, over-regulated, business-unfriendly, quasi-socialist states in the union – might have something to say about that. I tried searching his blog for the terms “socialist” and “socialism,” but that yielded only two blog entries, neither of which was about socialism. [One was apolitical in nature, while the other compared Israel to Karl Marx over the assassination of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin.] Funny, I thought the hypercapitalists decried everything as “socialist.” At least, that’s the rhetoric I remember from my LP days.

OK, so maybe this hyper-capitalist isn’t one of the ones who throws the s-word around. That’s cool; even at the height of my libertarian streak, I was never totally comfortable with that terminology, either. Surely, though, a more common, politically neutral word like “tax” will turn up something interesting, right? In fact, a search for the word “tax” yielded fourteen hits, only one of which made a remotely anti-tax argument. Hits Nos. 1, 2, 3, 6, all came up because of large block quotations, where someone else happened to mention the word “tax,” but the entries themselves were not about taxation. No. 7 dealt with taxes only tangentially, by alleging that Keith Richards once moved to France, of all places, to avoid them. Nos. 8, 9, 10, 11 12 were even further off the mark, as they do not contain the word “tax” at all; only “taxi.” That leaves only four blog entries that actually had anything to do with taxation; a paltry number for even a moderate capitalist, let alone a hyper one. [By contrast, I don't even claim to be a "hypercapitalist," just a regular one. I rarely blog about taxes per se, but a search for the term on my blog turned up almost 100 entries.]

Of the four tax related entries on Joey’s blog, only one, No. 14, contained a remotely anti-tax argument. That post rightly described Amtrak as “hauling tax dollars away, burning billions of them every nanosecond,” which is almost right, except for the number … oh wait, I misread that entry. He wasn’t bitching about Amtrak, he was talking about the Capitol, which is located right next to it. My bad.

Among the remaining three “tax” entries, No. 13 decried “the fakery of tax cuts,” while Nos. 4 and 5 went much farther than that. In No. 4, the Joehard pretty much kills any possibility that he is anything other than the ultraleftist I pegged him as:

Me: I’m a liberal Democrat and I Heart Kerry, and best of all, I trust him. I never trusted Bush, not at any time since his visit to Bob Jones University, let alone with the War Resolution; yet I understand why Kerry did trust him earlier on. I also understand why he voted against an earlier war. I think his humorless approach is appropriate for humorless times. I find his malleability a virtue in times that demand changing approaches. I like the fact that he showed enough sense at his lifestage to marry someone with (even more) money–many liberals act left and sleep right, it’s a time-honored tradition. I think all his houses are great, all nine of them or whatever. I think any gas tax would have been an excellent idea at any time in the past twenty years, especially if it were tied to preventing environmental degradation or public transit. I respect his nondistancing from Kennedy, the Senate’s Marius. I am proud of him saying that other leaders around the world want him to win. I rejoice that he called those sons of bitches “lying, you know, crooked” because it shows he can tell the truth in private. I think any photo with him and Jane Fonda is way cool. I like the fact that someone in his family has cousins in France; I wish to I did. I think he is Perfect for America. I think he’s the best Presidential candidate ever.
[Emphasis in original.]

Another hypercapitalist for Kerry and the gas tax, I see. Unfortunately for Joe Capitalist, his hero McCain doesn’t heart Kerry. If he did, he’d probably be his running mate right now, rather than that glorified ambulance-chaser, “second-string John.” He also doesn’t describe himself as a liberal Democrat, or even as a moderate one. And as a former POW in ‘Nam who was treated in a manner inconsistent with even the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, it’s a safe bet Mr. McCain isn’t all that Fonda Jane, either.

Hit No. 3 was just plain nasty. In that entry, he brags about the fact that he is so partisan he won’t even talk to old friends, whose only sin is continuing to be registered Republicans. Quoth Mr. Blow:

You’ve got the right number. I don’t hate you at all. What I’ve had in my life is a revulsion for Republicans in general. Some have been good and some have been bad at the local level, but the ones running this country I find intolerable. My own revulsion for them runs so deep it makes it difficult to engage supporters. The needless harassment of the Clinton impeachment started it. The disdain for democracy in the election fiasco deepened it. The manipulation of the fake War on Terror had me further horrified from the first day. The idiot’s fetish for wearing uniforms he hasn’t earned has always looked a little like Adolf’s. The tax cut for the rich while assfucking the poor makes me sick. The position on abortion has always made me cringe, but the support of the Gaybashing Amendment makes me now simply wish he and his cronies were dead. The new FCC shit runs contrary to everything American I believe in. I can’t abide people who support these things–I can’t–I like America too much.
I even don’t want to deal with people who cop out and say, “I don’t really don’t support these things, but I’m Republican anyway.” Maybe talk to me when someone else is in power.

Other gems I stumbled across without even looking for them include a description of the Party of McCain as “the Ostrich Party” which remains oblivious to Bush’s “lies” about everything he disagrees with, a running count of the dead in Iraq, with no accompanying estimates of how many are alive because of the same war, and a verbal fellatio for everyone’s favorite America hater, Michael Moore.

Yup, those sound like the words of a “hypercapitalist” who is a “barely slightly paler shade of blue than John McCain” (a claim he also makes here, albeit equally unconvincingly), all right.

As for Iraq the Model: sure, I would like someone to check him out other than through email, especially as his inchoate response to the torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib was less than convincing coming from an Iraqi, and there have been other incredulities.

Translation: even though the Baghdad Broadcasting Company thinks the trio are legit, that’s not good enough. It’s not enough that some Iraqis hate us and most want us out; all Iraqis are supposed to feel that way, dammit! Query whether any Iraqis are having a similar debate about Atrios, the Daily Kotze, or any other high-traffic liberal blogs. “Americans don’t think like that, dammit, this guy can’t be an American!”

Whatever he is/they are, the blog is certainly way out of step with what polls tell us about how Iraqis feel about America.

Well, duh. If the three are who they say they are – and I’m in no position to confirm or deny that – they are two dentists and a pediatrician. Hardly the average level of education or sophistication. Indeed, one might expect a trio like that to be more level-headed than the wacky Iraqis who drag bodies through the streets of Fallujah. No matter, Iraqis aren’t supposed to dissent; only Americans get to do that.

Retropublican ultraconservatives who truly want to win the peace in Iraq would do better reading honest reporting out of the country rather than fawning wishes, and could advance their own cause more credibly by not cherry-picking this blog, but to read someone a lot more in touch with Iraqi Street sentiment.

Sorry, pal, but I’ve already wasted a morning finding out as much as possible about where you stand on the issues. It’s clear that my original assessment of you as a moonbat and an ultra-leftist – as distinguished from an ordinary liberal, whom I could respect – is 100% accurate. I’m pretty sure you’re not a CIA plant, however; they’ve got better things to do than to post nonsense like that on a blog read by no one other than you, yourself and you.

UPDATE: Actually, the only point of this post was to help Justene’s blog reach Primate status. As you can see, it worked, producing 139 new links from 136 unique sites in just one day. Wow! Now if she can just return the favor…