After the mirthless and misplaced angerfest that Josh Marshall dumped on me in his emails this weekend, apparently while he was hip-deep in alligators, I was none too impressed by his doubling down on the unfounded insults today.

I can take an insult, but the key word here is unfounded. Because IF you read the email exchange of this weekend in full and IF you know that I've praised Josh personally, sent him ideas and offered TPM free use of original video of some important news events as recently as three hours before that exchange began, then you'll know I had no ax to grind with him until today. That's when Josh doubled down on this weekend's insults.

In a comment that begins by describing my allusion to his emails as being "a tad incomplete," Josh said that he was exasperated by what he called multiple instances of all-cap rants, a series of flame emails that got the conversation off on a bad foot. That would be a good excuse, but it's not the truth, and it's not what the record shows. Thus, I resorted to publishing the entire series of emails despite no prior intention of doing so.

To anyone who thinks Josh's temper flared due to supposed "rants" and "flame" emails sent by me, you are in error. Please read the entire email exchange and see that Josh gets testy only when I try without success to understand his words. Then take a look at your comments and those of your friends on miguelitoh2o's recent post. Weigh your stone carefully before throwing it at me through the window of your glass house.

To artappraiser, who called me a "nasty customer" based on Josh's factually wrong account, if you want to use Josh's statement to justify a little Ripper-bashing, you can get under my skin a little, but you can't touch the truth without grasping this: You see, my lifestyle doesn't depend on a million hits a month. The only entity on the face of the planet that can touch me is the federal government. As you may have noticed, I never lie to make nice with the Feds, either. So believe who you want.

Josh, I won't say that you lied about me tonight in front of an angry mob. "Lie" is too harsh a word because it conveys intent I can't know. I'll just say that you were wildly inaccurate on several counts, and that you should have known better. Maybe you didn't. But you should have known better than to double down.

Update: Josh has deleted the comment on two separate posts where I published the entire series of emails. For whatever reason, Josh doesn't want you to read them.

Late update: I'm leaving TPM for good but not closing my account until I can retrieve all of my posts, if that's possible before the clock runs out. This is my last post here. If anyone wants to see the complete 'Health Care in Black & White,' I will try to have it posted elsewhere, perhaps at dagblog or kos in the next week. But I have concluded that Josh has indeed lied knowingly, and I won't play at a crooked table where the house is stacked against me. Fare well to my friends. I thought you were a better man, Mr. Marshall.

It is a sad fact of today's "journalism" that controversy and celebrity trump facts, which now are almost universally irrelevant to the spin cycles of the news. I had hoped to find in TPM and TPMCafe a source of truth that embraced hard facts rather than glossing over them in catchy packaging and surreptitious opinion. But I can no more believe in this site's coverage than I can in the man who presides over it. Concealing proof is antithetical to publication of fact. Josh has concealed both.

The Rupert Murdochs and Josh Marshalls of the world see advocacy journalism as their God-given roles. Both lie and both do it with a guilt-free conscience. Hardworking journalists like the newspapermen of old--the kind I aspired and usually succeeded in being while journalism was my career--are now shunned by those who want their opinion and news rolled into one. And so the vast majority of people have forgotten that fact and opinion are not the same thing and that despots are allowed to rule only by confusing the two.

I will always be a Democrat until something better comes along. I will be an honest man forever. Good-bye.