After the New York Times Magazine article a lot of wingnut blogs are coming up with imaginative new smears tonight, but I’m grateful for the positive words from Alan Colmes: Little Green Footballs’s Charles Johnson And The Right-Wing Flame War.

Charles Johnson is a true original, his knowledge of code enabling him to be one of the first in the blogosphere, and his fierce independence angering those who initially embraced him. It’s this same independence that makes him eminently readable, and much more interesting than most of the web’s all-too-predictable presences.� His split with the most poisonous denizens of the right is profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Johnson fact-checks his profile in true LGF form.

A recent LA Times piece examined the Johnson’s evolution as a blogger and the reactions it engendered, with Johnson remarking, “The kinds of hate mail and the kinds of attacks I am getting from the right wing are way beyond anything I got when I was criticizing the left or even radical Islam.” (Click here for just one example.)

A recent Vanity Fair article explains more, including how Johnson is likely to stay at the forefront of the blogosphere.