Scott Horton and his truly evil doppelganger

Confederate Yankee’s post about Scott Horton, the Harper’s columnist who claims (1) that neocon’s lie as much about the war as Scott Beauchamp did and (2) that the American military is exactly like the KGB, got me wondering who Scott Horton is. The Harper’s bio is brief and makes the man sound vaguely saint-like:

Scott Horton is a contributor to Harper’s Magazine and writes No Comment for this website.

A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.

I also found it singularly uninformative, insofar as there’s little information about the world he and we live in today. Google turned up more stuff, some of it equally virtuous and antiseptic (this, for example), and some stuff so inflammatory that I finally realized that it couldn’t be the the same Scott Horton (attorney and human rights advocate) who writes for Harper’s. It’s apparently that the respected lawyer Scott Horton has a very bizarre doppelganger out there, someone who takes the lawyer Scott Horton’s splenetic bile and multiplies it by a scary factor of 10.

You see, what I found when I googled “Scott Horton” was something called “Stress : Scott Horton’s Blog.” The blog actually boasts 10 contributors, one of whom, in a creepy coincidence, is named “Scott Horton.”  This Scott Horton also hosts a series called Anti-War Radio, which is presented through MP3 downloads.

The entries by the other Scott Horton, the one who isn’t a respected lawyer writing for Harper’s, reveal a few things about the man:

He’s a Ron Paul supporter.

He subscribes to the notion that America caused the killing fields in Cambodia, not by pulling out, but by being there in the first place. Considering that the War at its early 1960s inception was to prevent Communism from taking over the entire Asian peninsula, I have my doubts about this argument. That is, one could equally well argue that our being there delayed the Communist takeover by a decade. However, that’s missing the point. Whether in Iraq or Vietnam, if one says that America created the conditions in which a genocide occurs, it seems to me that the morally right thing to do then is for America to stick around and prevent the massacre. It’s immoral just to shrug and say, “Sorry, we started it, but you’re on your own, boys.” Horton is just another one of those liberal still talking as if it’s 2003, and not dealing with the reality of 2007. Blame is not what’s needed here; appropriate future conduct is.

He’s annointed Guiliani as the fascist dictator to fill George Bush’s shoes, a point he illustrates with an atrocious Photoshop that takes an old picture of Hitler and Mussolini, and substitutes Giuliani’s head for Mussolini’s. (And if that’s not out-and-out bigotry, I don’t know what is.) Then, just to make sure we get the point, he says “Just think . . . One day this man’s headless corpse will be hung upside-down, beaten and burned by an angry mob.”

This venom-filled Scott Horton has good company on his blog.  Look at the stuff from his blog contributors:

Contributor Michael uploaded a replay of George Galloway’s commentary on last summer’s Israel/Hezbollah war, a war Michael describes thusly: “In the summer of 2006 Israel launched a ferocious bombing campaign against the country of Lebanon severely crippling it’s civilian infrastructure and killing and wounding thousands of it’s inhabitants. On two brodcasts British MP George Galloway visited southern Lebanon to survey, in his own words the carnage that had been wrought on the people of that area and Lebanon as a whole.”

Okay, sure, the war was controversial, especially with a little help from a criminally credulous or foully duplicitous media. But how about this contribution from vineyardsaker, who reveals himself to be a troofer, finding wisdom in Fisk’s latest effort at trying to appear marginally intelligent by questioning silly little things like facts and science? Please note how vineyardsaker tries to comfort himself for abandoning rationality by saying that “Fisk is definitely *not* a kook.” I guess that depends on how you define kook.

The latent anti-Semitism that appears in Michael’s post, coupled with the manifest irrationality in vineyardsaker’s post, comes to an ugly head in another vineyardsaker post, this one entitled “Let’s finally say it openly: Israel is a racist state which must be boycotted.” This would, of course, be the same Israel that is not only the sole full Democracy in the Middle East, but is also the only country in the Middle East that allows freedom of religion for all citizens and that, even though it is a religious state, gives full rights to its citizens of other religions (not to mention to Arabs whose brethren seek its demise). In this, it stands in stark contract to those presumably non-racist states surrounding it that ousted all the Jews (that would be every Arab state), that oust Christians (that would be Saudi Arabia), that discriminate against women (Saudi Arabia again leads the pack here), that discriminate against gays and lesbians (it’s a shame, but Iran just had to kill them), and that have no freedom of the press (Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc., etc.).

I’m getting bored stating the obvious here, but apparently we need to keep stating these things because of people like vineyardsaker, who get the benefit of our First Amendment to spout their ludicrous, hate-filled ideas on blogs owned by a guy named Scott Horton. (Thank God it’s not the same Scott Horton who writes at Harper’s, one of the oldest magazines in America.)

It was creepy reading this wacko, vituperative, irrational blog belonging to someone who shares the same name as the reputable lawyer and internationalist, Scott Horton.

I did find a few weird nexuses between the two men.  For example, I found a transcript of an interview with someone who is possibly the Harper’s Scott Horton, since, like the Harper’s Scott Horton, he’s also a lawyer. It’s entitled “Lawyer Scott Horton: “Vice President Cheney is the Man Who Unleashed Torture and Promoted it Within Our Military and Our Intelligence Service.” Interestingly, the transcript shows some of the same intemperate language that keeps appearing in the blog – and it yet I found nothing to indicate that the venomous blogger Scott Horton is a lawyer.  There’s one other funny nexus between these two Scott Hortons, one a distinguished lawyer, the other an anti-Semitic libertarian.  The anti-Semitic libertarian hosted an underground radio station in Austin, Texas — and the distinguished lawyer lives in Austin, Texas. It’s a coincidence, but it’s a funny one for all that.

If there’s ever a doppelganger for me, I hope that it’s some nice lady who lives in the Midwest, attends church regularly, has a family, and votes Republican!