The difficulty with being a bullshit artist is that you have to be meticulous about maintaining your facade, lest you become entangled in the intricate web you yourself have spun. And what makes this task doubly difficult is the fact that chronic bullshitters inevitably begin believing their own propaganda, which makes spotting the little chinks in their story all the more tricky.

It takes something of an evil genius to make a successful career of bullshit artistry; dimwits need not apply. Which is where Leon Bertrand came unstuck last week.

Self-styled superlawyer Bertrand, whose chubby little fingerprints were all over the recent “George Athanasi” debacle, thinks himself an exemplar of the Rational Right; by his own account, a “courageous” conservative with nothing to hide:

[...]
See, right-wingers tend to post under their own names because they are not afraid of the rest of the world knowing their views. It’s probably because our views are generally respected, so we don’t feel there’s anything to hide.
Either that or we are more courageous.
[...]

So imagine my delight last week when I discovered, in the “George Athanasi” comment thread on Bankruptus Maximus’ blog of shame, the following:

Evidently, Leon — silly sausage that he is — posted a sockpuppet comment but forgot to remove his URL from the homepage field. And it’s lucky I took a screen grab of the comment, because if you pay the thread a visit now, you’ll notice that Slandy has kindly removed the homepage from his adorable little sidekick’s comment.

One can’t help but wonder what this courageous conservative hypocrite has to hide.

PS: You’ll also notice, in the same comment thread, that Bertrand has now resumed posting under the name Leon — most likely due to an email I sent him yesterday alerting him to his embarrassing blunder. In that email, I asked him to explain what he had to hide. As yet, I’ve received no response.

PPS: Hilariously, Landeryou isn’t buying my denial that my name is George. Neither is Bertrand, who ingeniously asked me to provide proof that I’m not George. It’s a good thing I have my wits about me this morning: the crafty devil almost tricked me into revealing who I really am!

The Australian blogosphere’s most unctuous bottom-feeder, Andrew Landeryou, has proved once and for all the maxim “if you sleep with imbeciles, you’ll get dribbled on”.

Acting on a tip-off from Queensland’s most pernicious™ semi-literate blogger, Iain Hall, Landeryou last week “outed” me as one George Athanasi.

Partners in grime: blogging superheroes Rapunzhall and Bankruptus Maximus

The revelation raises several questions about blogging ethics. Leaving those aside, however, the most important question it raises is this: who is George Athanasi? Because it sure as hell ain’t me.

Several weeks ago I decided to test Iain Hall’s oft-repeated claim that he’s not a malicious net-stalker by setting him up. I sent him an email from my Ant Rogenous Gmail account, but changed my name to another fictitious one: George Athanasi.

The premise of my plan was that any decent, ethical person would ignore the name at the top of the screen and content himself with responding to the body of the email. If Hall did this, it would go some way to demonstrating that he is indeed the unassuming “respected conservative commentator” he has claimed; if, however, he chose to focus primarily on my “identity” and threaten to reveal it, it would provide conclusive proof of what most people already suspected: he is full of shit.

Predictably, Hall couldn’t resist the urge to go after “George”. His response began:

George
Thank you for sending me an email and is that really your name?
[...]

The fish was nibbling at the bait; it was time to set the hook. I changed my name back to Ant Rogenous and replied:

Never mind what my name is, Iain.
[...]

Hall’s response came quickly:

George
That must be your name as you have now very hastily changed the name that appears to recipients of emails from this account.
Would you care to offer an argument that makes a case for my discretion in the matter of who you actually are?
[...]

Hook. Line. Sinker.

Two sets of correspondence ensued in which I played up my indignation, eventually making a ludicrous counter-threat that Hall predictably construed as blackmail (more on this later).

Incredibly, Hall resisted the urge to reveal George’s identity outright, publishing instead a password-protected post at his ScroteWatch blog, where he merely reproduced our correspondence alongside my photograph and fake name. The password, imaginatively enough, is “George”.

Despite Hall’s claim that “compassion stayed his hand” in deciding not to out me, he clearly shared the information of my “identity” with at least two other people: fellow wingnuts Leon Bertrand and Andrew Landeryou. The former turned up in the comment thread of the ScroteWatch post, obviously having been given the password by Hall; the latter, of course, revealed all about George on his own blog, naming “conservative Queensland blog patriot Iain Hall” as his source.

Landeryou’s post is ridiculous, even by his usually embarrassing standards. In addition to beating up the non-existent story and quoting an obviously satirical, pun-laden biographical note about Ant Rogenous from Meet the GrodsTeam, he tracked down two real people by the name of George Athanasi and published their addresses.

He owes both of these men a public apology.

As a part of his beat-up, Landeryou also wrote the following about my “blackmail” attempt on Hall:

Legal insiders tell the OC that the threat made by George Athanasi is almost certainly a breach of s.87 of the Victorian Crimes Act, which sets out the offence of blackmail and prescribes a maximum sentence of fifteen years imprisonment for offenders.

So, what was the threat? Here’s what I wrote (since Landeryou conveniently didn’t quote it, preferring instead to make a vague reference to “software privacy (sic)”):

Hi Iain
I trust that your copy of Photoshop is a registered and legally purchased version, as software piracy is a very serious offence. It’d be a terrible shame if you’d obtained the software illegally and someone from Adobe received a tip-off and began asking you some difficult questions.
The easiest way around this tricky situation you might find yourself in is to delete the “Who is Ant Rogenous” post from Scrotewatch and undertake never to refer to me as George again — publicly or privately.
[...]

It’s clearly a preposterous threat, but “blackmail”? Hardly. The section of the Victorian Crimes Act to which Landeryou links hoses down that shrill claim itself:

… a demand with menaces (”blackmail”) is unwarranted unless the person making it does so in the belief-
(a)  that he has reasonable grounds for making the demand; and
(b)  that the use of the menaces is proper means of reinforcing the demand.

Since Hall was threatening to reveal, without my consent, an identity he’d gleaned from my private correspondence, any claim that my threat constitutes blackmail is laughable.

Landeryou’s “legal insiders” seem to be as daft as his source for the information about “George”. But just who are these legal heavyweights to whom he defers? The GrodsInvestigationUnit has narrowed the suspects down to two:

1. The customer-service professional at Brunswick KFC who once patiently explained why Landeryou could not legally use eight two-for-one Colonel Burger vouchers in a single transaction. It is believed that Landeryou was so impressed, he immediately entrusted this 16-year-old with his legal counsel.
2. Self-proclaimed superlawyer Leon Bertrand (pictured below).

“Goo-gah-brrrrrrrr. The prosecution rests”

So, what have the events of the past couple of weeks taught us?

First, Iain Hall is a malicious, unethical net-stalker who, in the absence of an ability to debate intelligently or in good faith, goes after the personal lives of his political opponents, and will swallow the most tenuous bit of bait — which any sane person would recognise immediately for a hoax — if he fancies it’ll give him some leverage. Brigid Gread demonstrated this some time ago with her (admittedly far more complex) sting. Already once bitten, Hall showed that he’s not intelligent enough to be twice shy.

Second, Andrew Landeryou is a miserable, odious peddler of bullshit whose inability to conduct his own research or even rely on that of credible sources gives a good insight into why his business ventures were doomed to abject failure.

In short, we’ve learned nothing we didn’t already know.

People who reside in several safe-houses
to avoid creditors shouldn’t thrown stones

Game off.

PS: Elsewhere, I note that Landeryou is threatening to reveal the identity of another blogger, Chief Bastard (CB) of Bastards Inc. Despite the fact that CB is a malicious, contemptible turd himself, I don’t condone what Landeryou claims he’s about to do. Hopefully “George Athanasi” has taught him to keep it in his pants — or, at the very least, get his facts straight if he’s intent on waving it around.

…when they say things like this:

In all honesty, opposite a preschool is probably not the best place for a gun shop.

He then, ingeniously, goes on to compare a Sydney suburb with WW2:

It’s almost as if they loathe guns, have these folks forgotten that all this family-focused and free to roam the streets [sic] is guaranteed by men with guns.

So, because a war is fought with guns….then everyone should love them?

Of course, some of us are comfortable enough with our masculinity that we don’t need to be packing heat.

I love the brilliance of their argument - if you don’t like guns, you’re a little girl!