My point is that this person has baseline qualifications (Physics PhD!), was accepted by the media as "qualified" to be a blogger, and yet was still a complete god damned moron even in his own field of "specialization".

It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was one.