Repulsive Twit Snoop at LAT Fired for Fake Names

Just when you started to believe that the left side of the blogosphere was pretty much totally populated by insane screeching females with compulsive hatred toward religion and the US Constitution [My Left Wing], along comes the story of a snooping anonymous weirdo male at the Los Angeles Times who unsurprisingly represents the ultra-left side of the state's leftish politics.

Howie Kurtz at the Washington Post has the goods on this moral leper, but in characteristic fashion lets his sources do the talking.

The Times suspended Hiltzik's blog on the paper's Web site last week after he admitted using one or more pseudonyms, in violation of the company's policy, to post derogatory comments on his and other people's blogs. The anonymous blasts by "Mikekoshi" were usually aimed at the same people he peppers on his Golden State blog, which is far more personal and inflammatory than his newspaper column on financial issues. Hiltzik also got into trouble in 1993, when the Times recalled him from the paper's Moscow bureau after he was caught hacking into colleagues' e-mail. He was exposed through an internal sting operation when he asked about phony messages that had been sent to other staffers in the bureau. "His answer was that he was nosy and curious," says Carey Goldberg, a former colleague in the Moscow bureau who now works for the Boston Globe. "We were extremely upset. It was an incredible invasion of privacy. There were a lot of personal e-mails in there."

Well, so we've established that this is a true low-life snooper and just the kind of colleague you don't want working with you on overseas journalistic assignments. But this creep has very few friends stateside alse. Another journalist has this:

Seipp says Hiltzik has apparently been taking potshots at her because she criticized him at the time of the 13-year-old incident. While Hiltzik is "a very smart reporter and writer," Seipp says, his behavior "suggests that this guy has a history of snooping around and is dishonest and doing things he shouldn't be doing. It's also self-destructive."

But of course, there's "no fault on the left," as the Leninist maxim holds and the usual it's okay because he was bashing Bush and the GWB supporters:

Claude Brodesser, who writes a Los Angeles column for the Web site Media Bistro, writes that anonymous posting is part of the Internet culture and that even reporters should enjoy that freedom. "Hiltzik might have cloaked his identity -- something seemingly at variance with the Times' policies -- but what he did was hardly lying or, for that matter, extortion," Brodesser says.

And so it goes. Lying, deception, treason: all okay if Kerry supporters and Berger proteges leak CIA national secrets to left-wing newspapers to weaken Bush. But Bush cannot declassify documents to support his own case like every other president, including sanctimonious prig Gee-mah Carter has done, because that's unfair.

Maybe we should allow the CIA senior-level Clintonista holdouts to blog anonymously and complete shred this country's credibility as anything other than a left-wing nuthouse.

But in the meantime, the CIA left-winger McCarthy should be prosecuted with extreme prejudice. I want to see the journalistic termites come out and defend treason openly, instead of aiding and abetting it under the table.