I visit Daring Fireball weekly.

Not because it’s a productive site to visit, but rather because I have a morbid curiosity to discover the latest rabidly-pro-Apple talking points: John seems to have full-time employment these days trawling through tweets or blogs to find those confirming his bias, however ridiculously misinformed or trollish, rewarding their efforts in the propaganda war by linking to them on Daring Fireball. It's like reading some fanatical political blog just for a laugh.

Of course John isn’t actually saying those nonsensical, almost always incorrect things himself. He just links to them, see. He’s just a disinterested third party who only coincidentally presents exactly the same slant and opinion from all of his links, while keepings the required arm-length distance that allows him the presumed leeway to pretend that he’s merely a messenger of tripe, and not an actual dung-slinger himself.

It works for him.

He has a lot of fans. There are a lot of rabidly pro-Apple fans who absolutely devour his entries because it comforts their worldview.

Gruber seems to have actually made a career out of pandering to zealots. Every week you’ll see those little [paraphrased] “this week’s slew of garbage brought to you by {some brand unconcerned about being associated with junk}”, John surely relying upon his analytics that tell him that every “Rah rah! Take that Google|Adobe|Motorola|HTC!” effluence stream gets him a lot of hits from his faithful, all eager to know that there’s no threat to the little bit of technology knowledge they have accrued. No threat that undermines their critical knowledge of the iTunes UI.

But really, the guy made markdown, genius in its simplicity. Isn’t he above that?

John, if you aren’t getting some fat checks from Cupertino, then you’re doing something wrong. If you are, and I have to hope that you are, then please at least post a “Sponsored by Apple” byline. That includes getting freebies and conference tickets and accommodations, as an aside.

I’m hardly alone in noting the dramatic decline of Gruber to PageRank-blessed fanboy (Gruber is worse than Scoble ever was, as an aside. I couldn’t stomach Scoble’s zealotry even when I was completely dependent upon and evangelizing the Microsoft platform. Benefitting from his message didn’t make his rhetoric any more palatable).

Hank Williams had a piece about Gruber’s decline a few weeks back (though I really think that the phrase “jumps the shark” has jumped the shark). One predictable response to Williams’ piece, however, was a lot of calls for proof of Gruber’s decline. As if to make a statement Williams had to present an A-B with point-by-point retorts to every one of Gruber’s astroturfing attempts.

Where, they asked, was proof that Gruber was now an unabashed over-the-top Apple fanatic who was so blinded by his zeal that he completely lost all critical perspective?

Just look at his site! It’s impossible to come to any other conclusion.