It's hard to know what to make of Charles Johnson, the batshit crazy founder of Little Green Footballs, engendering the hatred of his even batshit-crazier former compatriots.

Johnson and his recent penchant for heretical thinking has sparked a full-on blogger civil war (and got Glenn Beck all mad), pitting stupid brother against stupid brother. The Washington Independent took a look yesterday:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie - who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call "St. Pancake," a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled "anti-Jihadist" blogosphere - from "moonbat" ("an unthinking or insane leftist") to "anti-idiotarian" ("anyone who grasps the significance of and does his or her best to combat the post-9/11 political alliance between the ‘Old Left' and militant Islam").

But in the early days of Barack Obama's presidency, LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right - including conservative bloggers, critics of Islamic extremism, and critics of Islam in general who used to be Johnson's fellow travelers.

At issue is an anti-Islamic conference in 2007 organized by some of Johnson's acolytes. Among the invited attendees were members of a Belgian political party with ties to neo-Nazism, which is a perfectly natural fit, seeing as how the conference was organized around the idea that you should hate people who are different from you. Johnson took issue with the idea of his beloved anti-Islam movement being associated with neo-Nazis, and used his blog to attack members of the movement who got to cozy with extremists.

The whole thing has gotten out of hand, he told the Independent: "I don't think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore. It's all a bunch of kooks."

Well imagine that! If you organize people around the notion that all Muslims everywhere want to kill white Americans, some kooks show up at the table.

Johnson's experience with the nutjobs—of which he is one—on the right is an object lesson in why soft-headed liberals like to keep an eye on seemingly respectable people who flirt with hatred and racism in their political messaging. Because even if those people stop short of actually saying, "Let's round up the Muslins," they tend to attract, and lend credence to, the people who are going for that in the first place.

Johnson should be commended for taking a stand against neo-Nazis and Glenn Beck. And he should still be condemned for spending the last eight years giving them ammunition and inspiration. If neo-Nazis are into your ideas, Charles, you might want to rethink them.