So I posted this little fantasy a couple days ago about how a certain close-to-Clinton Demo Party hack got the Pandergate scandal started, right? Well, just replace “James Carville” with “Sidney Blumenthal” and you’ve got the story reported in Sid’s Secret?Triumph: By Mickey?Kaus
Is it an accident that the Democratic bloggers all pounced on the Lott tidbit buried in “The Note”? Think that if you like! My instinct tells me there is a tenth planet at work here, a hidden force behind the blogosphere’s rising influence. What is that force? E-mailers. People who send out tips and clips to bloggers, who in turn blog about them to the world.
And what highly active e-mailer was at work in this case? I think I know, and Podhoretz might be disturbed to learn his identity. His email address begins with the letters “sb …” which Democratic insiders will immediately recognize as belonging to Sidney Blumenthal, the controversial journalist and former aide to President Bill Clinton.
Sid was definitely responsible, in part, for Noah’s early pick-up of the Lott gaffe in Slate — Slate editor Jacob Weisberg got a Sid mass e-mail that relayed the “Note” item, and Weisberg forwarded it to Noah. What about Marshall? “I don’t disclose my sources,” he told me this morning. A wise policy! But I smell Sid there too. The mysterious Atrios e-mails to say “I’ve never communicated with Blumenthal. The first I saw of it was on the Note.” My guess is Sid is batting two for three here. Not bad. (That’s assuming, of course, that Atrios isn’t Blumenthal!)
So now that we know who was really pulling the strings of the Blogoshere, one of the pullees, Andrew Sullivan, claims the Lott supporters are really doing Bloomie’s work:
And the way in which some Democrats are gleefully using this to advance the notion that the GOP is synonymous with bigotry will only provoke the Republican Party’s instinctual self-defense. And so the paleos could acquire partisan support and the split could deepen. Maybe this is all part of Sid Blumenthal’s master-plan. If so, then Ann Coulter is dancing to Sid’s tune perfectly.
This is the most disingenuous thing I’ve read on the web in a long time, but what do you expect from a so-called conservative who’s been caught doing the other side’s dirty work? Hysterically over-the-top emotional reaction, mainly.