Barrett Brown has another funny (because it’s true!) piece at True/Slant about his adventures in the netherworld of Internet stalkerdom, and the deranged characters who’ve dedicated their shabby lives and shabbier blogs to posting weird childish smears of yours truly: In Which I Try My Hand at Cartooning and Subsequently Run Afoul of Two Crazy People.

Sometimes one encounters craziness by complete accident. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been haranguing anyone willing to listen regarding conservative pundit Robert Stacy McCain and the mounting evidence of his racism and various previously-concealed ties to the neo-Nazi movement. The whole affair has led me into a friendly coordination with Charles Johnson, the blogger who helped break the Rathergate story, co-founded the conservative blog consortium Pajamas Media, and otherwise served for many years as one of the right’s most celebrated citizen journalists. It turns out, though, that Johnson is not so much a conservative as he is simply an adamant critic of Islamic fundamentalism – and, to the horror of many, an opponent of Christian fundamentalism as well, this being an unforgivable offense among many of those who once thought the noted blogger to be swell but today routinely dismiss him as “Mad King Charles.”

The latest symptom of Johnson’s astonishing descent into psychosis, as several conservative pundits have explained to me over the past couple of weeks, is his inexplicable insistence on pointing out that McCain has lately been exposed as the very thing that he’s always appeared to be – a southern racist who associated for years with the now-jailed neo-Nazi leader William White and even helped to get his articles sold to�The Washington Times during his stint as an editor; who wrote about the dangers of white “race suicide” by way of teen pregnancy prevention measures that target whites instead of just blacks – and did so under an assumed name inspired by various Confederate “heroes” – for the white supremacist outlet American Renaissance; who in an e-mail once characterized “revulsion” as a “natural” reaction to mixed-race marriages; who before his rise to national prominence wrote dozens of internet forum messages in defense of slavery and in support of white political control over non-white populations while using the same pen name (a name to which he has admitted ownership); and who has otherwise expended some very significant amount of time and energy in opposing the aspirations of black American citizens. Of all the clear evidence against him, he has taken issue only with a former Times co-worker’s characterization of him as a loud, angry racist – apparently the accuser is simply out to get him and, worse, divorced. Even after addressing that particular charge against him in a recent blog post, he nonetheless announced�a few days later that he shall not address any of my charges against him because I will simply keep coming up with more charges. He’s right. …

Which brings me to a fun and illustrative little anecdote. Last week, McCain published a rather well-inked and crisply-colored cartoon composed by an admiring conservative artist, with the thrust of the message being that Charles Johnson is a whining baby who wears baby diapers and soils his diapers and is otherwise a baby; meanwhile, several prominent conservative bloggers and newly-minted Johnson foes such as Hot Air headliner Ed Morrissey and actual cartoon character Pam Geller are standing around talking about how much of a big, diaper-wetting baby Johnson has turned out to be (the character depicting blogger Dan Riehl even explains, lest any subtlety make its way into the panel, that Johnson “just needs his diaper changed”).

Still, I figured the art could be salvaged, so I downloaded the cartoon, changed all the text, and sent my new version to McCain, Johnson, and the artist himself. McCain responded with a big blog post in which he likens me to the�commissar�of �”a Maoist re-education camp” and otherwise got so caught up in his inimitably flamboyant nonsense that he seems to have forgotten to thank me for the cartoon. The artist and some other person associated with the artist’s blog, on the other hand, sent me a bunch of wacky e-mails to which I tried my best to respond. This afternoon, I received yet another e-mail from one of the two informing me of “the huge backlash coming [my] way” and warning that my career is now in danger. I gave them permission to print the e-mails only to realize that they’d already put them up anyway; I shall send the reader to go take a gander at them in a moment, as the whole exchange is wonderfully illustrative of�the mentality of those who have defended McCain and accuse his attackers of libel without even bothering to look at the evidence being presented.

Read it all. Those tiny popping sounds you hear in the distance are stalkers’ heads exploding.