It seems that Mighty Sean Guillory has struck out.

First he tried to solicit outside contributions for his pathetic little excuse for a blog. The only thing that turned up was some sewage produced by that freakish psychopath Mike Averko, and he and Sean were soon on the outs just like Mike and the lunatics at Russia Blog (Mike being too extreme even for extremists). Sean quickly realized that you can’t make a living taking sloppy seconds from lunatics.

Then he tried writing for the conservative Pajamas Media blog (so much for Sean’s supposed liberalism). To date, over the course of ten months he’s produced three articles for PM, and they’ve generated twelve comments (including one from Kim Zigfeld). Speaking of Kim, a person for whom Sean has expressed boundless, haughty contempt, in that time she’s published fifteen articles on PM (you can see them listed on our sidebar), just the most recent pair of which have generated 33 comments, and two more are in the immediate works. Ouch.

And most recently, Sean took to writing for that fetid pail of excrement known as the eXile (so much for Sean’s supposed scholarship). And no sooner had he done so than the Kremlin promptly put his new employer out of business (the eXile, too, had been pathologically critical of Kim, essentially trying to put out a hit on her; Sean, apparently, had no problem with that). It turns out that, contrary to its claims, the eXile was far from a successful enterprise, and its publisher is left holding a well-deserved bag full of debt and crestfallen wet dreams.

It’s more than a little ironic that the last thing Sean “wrote” for the eXile , and one of the last things it will be remembered ever to have published, was a childishly jealous tirade against Boris Nemtsov’s white paper, first published in English here on this blog. Though the respected New York Review of Books (citing our translation) and the prestigious Carnegie Center both lauded the work, as did many others, Sean actually seemed to believe that he alone could perspicaciously see through the miasma and realize that Nemtsov’s work was meaningless (presumably, mostly because it hadn’t been written by Sean). That view is pretty rich coming from an individual with a track record like Sean’s, isn’t it?

If Sean were one-tenth as brilliant as he imagines himself to be, then surely some more scholarly publication would be eager to illuminate the world with his genius. If he were one-fiftieth the proponent of liberalism he claims to be, surely he would have offered the world a defense of it at least twice as significant as Nemtsov has done.

And yet, just as with the others at the eXile, it has not happened.

So we are left to conclude that Sean’s claimed scholarship and liberalism are only, as they often are with academics of his ilk, mere artifices of self-delusion, that the only thing that really matters to Sean is his monumental, condescending arrogance and his contempt for anyone who dares to interfere with it -- this includes most of America. It's a tragedy, really, because as we've said before if Sean would only have the humility to confine himself to the topic he actually know about, his research and translations, he could make a contribution to the understanding of Russia. But like Russia itself, Sean seems intent on bashing his thick skull up against the same wall over and over again in the ardent belief that soon it will come crashing down.

The eXile was a filthy little rag which was published by outcasts of the United States, freaks who felt like bigshots when they surrounded themselves with hapless Russians. It sustained itself by hawking those same Russians as mail-order brides to foreigners, and publishing nude photographs of them for the general amusement. It was a prepubescent pile of rat droppings and, sad to say, the world is better off without it.

And they took themselves oh, so seriously. Here's the rag's publisher, Mark Ames, bemoaning his fate in RadarOnline:

I started up the Exile 11 years ago with a Russian publisher, and it grew into a kind of cult phenomenon, with an online readership of 200,000 visitors per month, launching the careers of Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and the "War Nerd," Gary Brecher, but ensuring that anyone who sticks with the paper is condemned to a life of poverty and paranoia.

So many loyal readers and yet bankrupt. Go figure! Churning out so many awe-inspiring journalist, and yet utterly without allies. How odd!

It’s significant that we are saying that, because as is rather well known we miss few opportunities to criticize Vladimir Putin’s Russia. We'd love to be able to attack him over this, too. But no matter how hard we try, we can’t bring ourselves to shed any tears for the eXile (to be sure, if the situation were reversed, they wouldn’t shed any for us). In an article about our blog, they falsely alleged that we had claimed 100,000 visits when in fact we had claimed 100,000 page views (they characterized our statement, they didn’t quote it). Then they showed a screenshot of our visit counter to prove we didn’t have 100,000 page views. They did all this in direct response to those fanatical opponents of this blog who wish to silence us by any means possible. When we pointed this out, they issued no correction, much less apology.

That was the eXile in microcosm. They had the chance, by practicing Western standards of professional journalism, to prove that those in the West who had spurned them had in fact underestimated them, and they had the chance to teach Russians about what it means to be a courageous professional journalist. Instead, they chose fratboy antics (or perhaps, given their acumen, they had no other choice), launching pathetically lame scatalogical attacks on hard-working professionals who were covering Russia at the world's leading media outlets as if they held the only true insights on America and Russia on the planet. They really believed that, just like Sean did, and that's why he was one of them. They drank the Kool Aid.

And that will be the story of them.