{"id":2664,"date":"2002-12-18T01:17:36","date_gmt":"2002-12-18T08:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/12\/not-really-a-fantasy\/"},"modified":"2002-12-18T01:17:36","modified_gmt":"2002-12-18T08:17:36","slug":"not-really-a-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/12\/18\/not-really-a-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Not really a fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tSo I posted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bennett.com\/archives\/week_2002_12_15.html#001227\">this little fantasy<\/a> a couple days ago about how a certain close-to-Clinton Demo Party hack got the Pandergate scandal started, right? Well, just replace &#8220;James Carville&#8221; with &#8220;Sidney Blumenthal&#8221; and you&#8217;ve got the story reported in <a href=\"http:\/\/slate.msn.com\/default.aspx?id=2075444\">Sid&#8217;s Secret?Triumph: By Mickey?Kaus<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Is it an accident that the Democratic bloggers all pounced on the Lott tidbit buried in &#8220;The Note&#8221;? Think that if you like! My instinct tells me there is a tenth planet at work here, a hidden force behind the blogosphere&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;sb &#8230;&#8221; which Democratic insiders will immediately recognize as belonging to Sidney Blumenthal, the controversial journalist and former aide to President Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n<p>Sid was definitely responsible, in part, for Noah&#8217;s early pick-up of the Lott gaffe in Slate &#8212; Slate editor Jacob Weisberg got a Sid mass e-mail that relayed the &#8220;Note&#8221; item, and Weisberg forwarded it to Noah. What about Marshall? &#8220;I don&#8217;t disclose my sources,&#8221; he told me this morning. A wise policy! But I smell Sid there too. The mysterious Atrios e-mails to say &#8220;I&#8217;ve never communicated with Blumenthal. The first I saw of it was on the Note.&#8221;  My guess is Sid is batting two for three here. Not bad. (That&#8217;s assuming, of course, that Atrios isn&#8217;t Blumenthal!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So now that we know who was really pulling the strings of the Blogoshere, one of the pullees, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andrewsullivan.com\/index.php?dish_inc=archives\/2002_12_15_dish_archive.html#90065726\">Andrew Sullivan<\/a>, claims the Lott supporters are really doing Bloomie&#8217;s work:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nAnd 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&#8217;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&#8217;s master-plan. If so, then Ann Coulter is dancing to Sid&#8217;s tune perfectly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is the most disingenuous thing I&#8217;ve read on the web in a long time, but what do you expect from a so-called conservative who&#8217;s been caught doing the other side&#8217;s dirty work? Hysterically over-the-top emotional reaction, mainly.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;James Carville&#8221; with &#8220;Sidney Blumenthal&#8221; and you&#8217;ve got the story reported in Sid&#8217;s Secret?Triumph: By Mickey?Kaus Is it an accident that the Democratic bloggers all pounced on the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/12\/18\/not-really-a-fantasy\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Not really a fantasy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-GY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}