You probably haven’t heard of former CIA employee Larry Johnson, but he has a certain cachet on the left. He has given the Democratic Party’s weekly radio address, is a big favorite among liberal bloggers, and has appeared as an “expert” on terrorism on PBS and other mainstream outlets. So you might assume he isn’t a complete moron.
Think again. The Larry Johnson paper trail starts in July 2001–two months before September 11–when he wrote in the New York Times that the terrorist threat was “declining,” and that Americans, despite being “bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism,” have “little to fear” from such attacks. An interesting window into the mindset of the CIA, or at least a portion thereof, pre-September 11, but hardly a qualification to be considered an “expert” on the subject.
Johnson’s obliviousness to the terrorist threat hasn’t stood in the way of his being lionized by liberal Democrats, mostly because he took up the cudgels on behalf of socialite Valerie Plame, who was liberated from her desk job at the CIA by the happy fortuity of being named, accurately, as the guiding spirit behind her husband’s ill-fated trip to Niger, which he lied about in the same newspaper that published Johnson’s assessment that the terrorist threat was “declining.”
But those were only figurative cudgels. Now the contemptible Mr. Johnson is issuing threats to conservative bloggers. You think that might be hyperbole? Johnson wrote:
I know where you are living. You forget that I do work for the European Union and friends in Interpol. I’ve offered you a mature way to deal with this situation. You’re obviously too immature and inexperienced to recognize the offer for what it is. Too bad.
Sounds llike a threat to me, even if Johnson wasn’t the telephone caller who said, “You’re a dead man.” We keep watching the left sink lower and lower, and every time we think they’ve hit bottom, they get worse. Here is a guy who has been an official spokesman for the Democratic Party and has been hailed as an expert on terrorism by PBS–never mind that his views were ludicrously off the mark–issuing threats of bodily harm to a little-known conservative blogger. One is tempted to say that the Democrats couldn’t possibly sink lower, but somehow I suspect they will surprise us yet again.
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