After the arrest of Alabama blogger Roger Shuler on October 23, right wing blog speculation over the identity of RogerS, who leaves comments here from time to time, reached fever pitch. Robert Stacy McCain, Aaron Walker, John Patrick Frey, Kimberlin Unmasked, and even Ken White all weighed in with excitement bordering on bloodlust. In fact, one might even be tempted to think that all their blogging about Shuler’s arrest was driven by an intense desire to link Mr. Shuler with this website, as if they thought such a link would magically absolve Team Akbar of defamation. But last Thursday evening, RogerS spoiled their plans with a comment from the same IP address that he always uses. Here is a redacted screenshot of his comment from our admin panel:

RogerScomment

And here is the previous comment from RogerS, which we have also redacted. We are not going to show you the full IP address, but we will say for the record that its geolocation is not even close to Alabama. Also, note that RogerS left this comment a few hours after Mr. Shuler was arrested. Does Team Akbar suppose that he is commenting from jail?

RogerScomment2

Just to be sure, here is the comment RogerS left here two days before that one using the same IP address, the same email address, and the same style.

RogerScomment3

Looking over Team Akbar’s blog coverage of Shuler’s arrest, we find Aaron Walker the most hypocritical. A few weeks ago, Walker pretty much admitted to practicing law without a license in Maryland; now he tries to compensate by speculating about RogerS, Roger Shuler, and whether the latter has broken the law by making litigation-related comments as the former. But for sheer dumbassery, R.S. McCain is impossible to beat. As if to underscore just how desperately he needs to believe RogerS is Roger Shuler, on Saturday McCain wrote a breathless justification for his conspiracy theory. McCain’s writing is far short on proof, but overly long on speculation. He seems to think that Shelby County deputies would be justified in seizing Mr. Shuler’s computer to search for proof of nefarious criminal coordination with McCain’s mythical “Team Kimberlin.” Or better yet, McCain would like someone to subpoena all the comment records for this website.

But as with Aaron Walker’s desire to depose the friends of Brett Kimberlin’s children, this is just another fishing expedition inspired by delusional thinking. Perhaps Bill Schmalfeldt made matters worse with his own confusion as to whether Mr. Shuler was an attorney, but there you go: McCain says “Team Kimberlin” are all liars, and that everything they say is a lie, until they say something that McCain wants to believe. Then, suddenly, “Team Kimberlin” is accidentally admitting the truth, and then conveniently goes right back to being liars in the next sentence. Only McCain is capable of discerning which “Team Kimberlin” statements are the true ones and which are the errors of a 58 year-old Parkinson’s patient reacting to early and limited information.

McCain’s boss Ali Akbar was so eager to capitalize on Shuler’s arrest that he coaxed Bill Schmalfeldt onto his podcast the very next day. This did not work out quite the way Akbar wanted, though. While he was able to ask Schmalfeldt about an Akbar-related story that Shuler reported in June 2012, Akbar seemed to admit operating a fraudulent charity in the process. That same evening, Akbar’s employee R.S. McCain wrote about Shuler’s arrest; then so did Frey and Walker, who has now written several posts on the topic. This Shuler-Kimberlin narrative seems to be very important to Team Akbar, so we do not expect our words or the above images to persuade them of their folly. Instead, we simply note that all of these idiots suggest Shuler’s arrest proves some point about Brett Kimberlin’s lawsuits against them. Just consider what Mr. Shuler has experienced:

  • Rob Riley, Jr., the man suing Shuler, is the son of a former Alabama governor and a powerful figure in the state GOP in his own right
  • Riley had Roy Moore, the radically right wing Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, appoint a special judge in the case
  • The proceedings are under seal so that no one, not even a pro bono representative for Shuler, can access any documents without going to Riley’s law firm
  • The warrant used to arrest Shuler is an unconstitutional prior restraint; even Ken White says so
  • Shuler was arrested with brutal force and is still being held without bond

So far, Mr. Kimberlin has sent no one to find R.S. McCain in his basement, shove him into a stack of boxes, spray MACE in his eyes, and haul him away in handcuffs. McCain would doubtless scream at the obscenity of such mistreatment, but he approves of these same actions directed against Mr. Shuler. Indeed, his blogging seems to celebrate the event. McCain has moved on from calling Shuler crazy to making fun of his wife Carol, always reminding readers how much they should hate Melissa Brewer, who he still seems to think is writing our posts. Rest assured this is also pure horse shit.

But what else did anyone expect? Surely @Popehat saw this coming. He had to know what McCain is, that he hates liberals with the utter contempt and eliminationist loathing of a racist. He does no fact-checking against what he thinks he knows. He panders to a reactive audience that actually believes the president was born in Kenya, and hoards guns and gold in anticipation of the Second Amendment remedies for Obamacare. The tone is absolutist and authoritarian: if you disagree with McCain’s politics, you are not human, and therefore not entitled to constitutional protections. Team Akbar is characterized by two kinds of thinking, magical and misanthropic, and McCain is the perfect avatar for both. Surely Mr. White approves?

As with their many other failed narratives, we sincerely hope that Team Akbar tries this “Shuler defense” in a real courtroom. We would love nothing more than to see them arrive with an entire portfolio of exhibits related to Roger Shuler, because every day they waste on this tar baby is another day they have not spent preparing to defend themselves outside of blog court. Why have they invested so much hope in RogerS? We do not pretend to know, but we really hope they do not stop.

2 thoughts on “Why Is Team Akbar So Invested In Believing That Roger Shuler Comments Here?”
  1. It won’t matter how many screenshots you post. The nuts will believe what they want to believe, and see the “evidence” they want to see. Nothing can persuade them from the paranoid path of their own destruction, and at this point no one should even try. If they want to show up in courtrooms with this garbage, I say let them go for it, because trying to offer them good advice just gets you labeled as a Team Kimberlin harasser.

    Popcorn?

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