Longtime JLF and CJ readers will be familiar with the ravings of James Protzman, businessman and former Chapel Hill councilman, who is one of the leaders of the Democratic site BlueNC.com. For years, he has devoted a bizarre amount of time to reading (poorly) and responding (tendentiously) to publications and posts by my colleagues and me. The practice may have started strictly as an effort to gain attention for a new site, but it soon began to take on the markings of someone working out personal issues in public. I thought it best not to spend much time responding to him, because either he was faking it to gain attention (and thus didn’t deserve it) or had personal issues not worth picking apart in a public forum.
But it’s gone on for the years now, and mutated into a larger critique of North Carolina political and media culture that, apparently, a few other left-wing bloggers with better manners also believe and peddle. Protzman’s constant personal attacks against Art Pope and the Pope Foundation, one of the founders of JLF, have often verged into character assassination, insinuations of criminal behavior, and other grotesques. Fortunately, from talking to politicos and media folks across the political spectrum, I get the sense that he is read more for comedic value than taken seriously.
I still think it’s best to focus most of our attention on substantive policy debate and articles read by more than just a handful of partisans, but when Protzman ventures into the broader blogosphere to make specific, ludicrous assertions, I’ll correct the record. This happened yesterday in the midst of a thread at the N&O‘s Under the Dome blog. You can read the thread and my lengthy response here. The entire dispute is a leftover from a previous set of assertions by Protzman that also made no sense.
I would hope that sensible leftists (there are still quite a few) would have the decency and wisdom to steer clear of Protzman and his self-destructive inanities, but I’ve also been accused of undue optimism.
