What Lib OC Hides in Its Defense of Brandman

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Illustration based on a photo by Lib OC writer Dan Chmielewski, who used it in a defense of Jordan Brandman calling a female City Council colleague a NSFW “rhymes-with-stunt” genital term and threatening to rip off her breasts — which not even posting a shot of him standing next to a leading feminist like the unwitting Senator Gillibrand can remediate, although a true PR professional still has to try.

Something has been missing from discussion on Lib OC about Jordan Brandman’s “not even a non-apology apology” for his calling his former colleague Denise Barnes a vile name preceded by an enhanced obscene adverb and accompanied by a threat to commit an act of violent maining once favored by certain Latin American dictators (which he asserted he could use because he learned it from his deceased mother): my own submitted comments.

Normally, I wouldn’t make a big deal out of this: I do not expect fair treatment from the proprietor of that blog, to whom I breezily refer to as Chumley because he and his former blogging partner together resembled a certain ’60s-era cartoon duo (as well as that it saves a hell of a lot of retyping.)  But he came here a while ago to claim that we were censuring his comments on this site while he was allowing our comments on his site — which was exactly backwards.  (He allows Vern’s comments, but not mine, except when I’ve issued take-down orders for the anonymous defamatory comments about me and Vern which used to be most of what appeared in his comments section.)  And as a PR professional, he knows that a lie repeated enough times with adequate challenge comes to be taken as truth.  (Indeed, I think he depends on it!)

So, I’m printing screenshots of my comments, languishing in moderation at his site prior to eventually being discarded, here.  I have a few others lying around that I’m tossing in as well, because this seems like the place for it.

The serious aspect of this, of course, is that Anaheim’s City Council (and it’s HR and PR staff as well) have to figure out what they are going to do in the wake of Brandman’s vicious writings to a member of quasi-governmental “Anaheim First” about his colleague.  Their judgment is best aided by a thorough discussion of the issue in the press.  As Chumley has ruled that out, and it’s too petty for Voice of OC’s Facebook page, and too lowbrow for the Register, I suppose that it will have to happen here.

#1: And This Guy Complains About “Squirrel!”

How far will Chumley go to avoid a substantive defense of Brandman?  At least this far: he’s willing to become the literal stereotype of an unfair and pernicious questioner.  I tried to get the conversation back onto the right track.

#2: Greg’s Takedown of the Non-Apology

This was the main thing I had come there to write — and “you” here applies to Chumley.  If it has much in common with Vern’s comments on Jordan’s non-apology in these pages, that’s just due to the two of us following the same putrid scent up the same trail.  (The first part is a response to Chumley amplifying Jordan’s implication that some missing context in the text chain somehow justified his vile response):

#3: Why is Gillibrand There With Jordan?

Continuing the conversation of why Dan, who probably has an huge number of publishable photos of Jordan to choose from — and I’m not saying that any of him are in his bathroom, OK? — choose to publish one of him standing next to famously feminist Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of all people?  If Jordan had instead used racial insults against Denise, would we have instead seen a photo of Jordan standing next to a Black or Latino politician?  (Well … yes, we probably would have.  But wait … that’s the point!) So let’s see what scared Chumley enough to spike it!

While the content of Jordan’s texts largely speaks for itself, I expect that some DNC members might use the occasion of my contacts with Sen. Gillibrand to reach out and discredit me, Vern, Denise, this blog generally, etc.  That’s fine!  Gillibrand’s office being able to stack up those comments against what the appropriation of her image for the pink-washing we’re complaining about — before she’s asked about it by various reporters — will be all to the good!

#4: OK, Let’s Go Back to Masturbating*

*By which I mean the topic, not the activity. (But you be you!)

Chumley has what strikes me as an unhealthy curiosity about Vern’s private sexual behavior.  Or, at the least, he is desperate to hang on to the fiction that Vern actually sent a bunch of very inappropriate tweets to a woman in whom his wife Donna was concerned might be a future focus on his romantic interest.  Donna took some extreme steps to make him sound unpalatable to her by posing as him in some vulgar and inappropriate texts.  (Not something I would do or want my wife to do, and my guess is that it was based on misinformation regard the by now very tamed-down Vern, but it is clearly an effective way of keeping one’s husband on the straight and narrow.)  That target of this jealousy happens to be a friend of our former columnist Tito Watch, who — rather than look for both sides of the story — swallowed Chumley’s distortions and lies almost entirely unchewed.  And he wrote a piece about it which Chumley still links to often.

Chumley is delighted by this, and treats these ventriloquist “confession” tweets as if they did come from Vern and therefore represent topics on which Vern can fairly to quizzed on from now until Doomsday.  But in order to do that, he has to profess the belief that it was indeed Vern’s writing — which he either knows is false or showing reckless disregard of the truth in pretending is true.  (In other words, Chumley doesn’t have the legal safe harbor against defamation that he thinks he does.)

As noted, as one of the gross-out tweets touches on the topic of masturbation, Chumley has gleefully himself started repeatedly touching it with startlingly ferocious vigor, until he is physically spent from handling it by the end of the blogging day. If you think that I’m overstating things (as opposed to overwriting them, as with that last sentence), consider the following evidence.

First of all, while we don’t ban all anonymous posters, we do generally ban ones that use anonymity as a shield to lob attacks without impacting their own reputation.  (And if we’ve ever allowed a username like “Jack Meoff” during the time I’ve been here, I don’t recall it.)  But Chumley revels in this sort of thing — aside from Vern and a few others, it’s pretty much the only commenting he gets — and will sniff about his not blocking people from his site as we do with people who are anonymous character assassins or bigots intent on making the site an unbearable ecosystem.  (Contrast that thundering piety with, as you’ll see, his effectively banning me.)

#5: Dan & Hand Puppets Keep Hunting Squirrel

Far from spiking Jack Meoff’s comment, Chumley forcefully embraces it — after all, it distracts from discussing Jordan’s breast ripping and sexist name-calling! — going along with his imaginary friend’s trying to gin up another supposed romantic association about which Donna could get angry at Vern.

This accusation — first anonymous, then depraved — is to my mind at least as rude towards Bethany as Donna was towards Vern — fight me on that one, Tito Watch! — but Donna had the excuse of trying to protect her marriage and Chumley only has the excuse of maybe some major personality and character disorders.

Chumley then, as usual, jumps into the “you don’t have money so will this ‘new’ woman support you?” — again, the woman in question is a bereaved innocent bystander in this exchange! — which leaves me more mordantly interested than I’d like to be in the comparative size of Chumley and his professional reporter wife’s paychecks.  (I mean, seriously — he’s obsessed!  And, like Trump, obsessed with the defense of projection.)

Vern handled himself with admirable coolth, and Chumley comes back with a bit I have to write out here for the search engines, in case he belatedly and intelligently deletes it from his site:

“how is your job hunt coming along Vern?  I’m thinking people are going to have a tough time shaking hands with you especially after using the restroom.”

Get it?  That’s because, in Chumley’s brain, Vern is supposedly returning from the bathroom after having masturbated.  (And doesn’t know how to wash?)  As I said, Vern’s penis is a pretty sick obsession of Chumley’s.

But that’s not enough: next Chumley writes — again rather than defending Jordan’s language:

“Vern go back to your bathroom and gaze at twitter photos of someone you think is a woman who [isn’t] your wife … like your wife said you did.”  (Emphasis added)

So Chumley knows that this is coming from Donna rather than Vern under Vern’s name, but he wants people to believe that it’s true nonetheless, because it suits his purpose of character assassination.

That’s not just “gross indifference to the truth,” it’s gross gross indifference.

How would I know this?  Because here’s what I wrote him — which he deleted form moderation, because — unlike “Jack Meoff’s” subtle wit, he didn’t want you to see it.

Really, that first question was a pretty simple yes or no chance for him to say that he was only teasing — rather than actually trying to convince people that something embarrassing but false was actually true — and … he deleted the comment.

And if all of this takes your mind away from Chumley’s putrid lack of condemnation of what Jordan Brandman admits to having done — well, that’s what it was supposed to do!  Get people talking about a false story — about the reporter who put together the story about Jordan’s texts — rather than a true one.  And we’ll find out soon which side Anaheim’s City Council is on.

#7: Oh, and About the Vets Cemetery:

You’ll notice some little discussion between us as well about whether the Vets Cemetery will go to Irvine and, if so, where.  It will be pretty simple to get a cemetery — actually two, one for vets and and adjoining one for everyone — built at the remote Gypsum Canyon site where Anaheim borders Corona.  (Yes, it does.)  Agran has created an initiative-driven legal mess in Irvine to where it’s probably either the ARDA site or nothing — and so it will be nothing. Chumley, as usual, has bad and biased sources.

#8: All Dan Knows About Water Policy Fits In….

To try to clear more of my backload of deleted comments, this exchange occurred on a different post on Lib OC.  (I was poking around, not having been there for about a month, and it was ostensibly on MWDOC policy — a board we cover extensively here and one for which I’ve run — mostly just to make point about Poseidon, pollution, and corruption — twice.)  Chumley was apparently parroting what someone with money and a pecuniary interest had told him about MWDOC.  And he ends up slamming and threatening two exceptionally good council members — both OJB endorsees, perhaps not incidentally — to make his point.  Vern takes him on regarding both MWDOC and Brandman, and Chumley blathers on MWDOC and makes some interesting claims about Brandman — which, having some experience with taking depositions and confronting dubious witness testimony, led to the retort below.

#9 Anonymous Dope Deals in Defamation

This one is especially interesting to me, because my response to someone anonymous dork challenging my understanding of DUIs — sort of important career-wise — wasn’t published. The second paragraph is filled with false assertions that I’m not bothering to rebut here — if I give Chumley a take-down notice it will be by mail, and if he doesn’t then Plan B is delicious — because … and this far down I think I can raise the rating of this post from PG to R — the matter at hand is about Jordan Brandman’s issuing a hollow non-apology, through Chumley’s site, for texting a startled and upset soon-to-be ex-friend that a Councilwoman he served with was an “unfuckingbelievable cunt” and that he would do what his mother often pledged to do to other women and “rip her tits off.”  Chumley would like us to think about anything other than that — and he’s willing to hypocritically defuse to print criticisms of his wrong-headed complicity in order to ensure that we don’t.

And the question is no longer merely “what should be done with Brandman?”, but “what should be done with  eager mouthpiece for Democratic corruption and unaccountability Mr. Chumley?”  There’s nothing illegal about being a repulsive, disingenuous, bigot-protecting asshole — but shaming is within our means.

Dan Chmielewski is as welcome to comment here as I am unwelcome there — and I take some pleasure in his apparently finding me frightening beyond even his able interlocutor Vern — but he’s not welcome to keep lying about it.


About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)