Sidney is widely credited with distributing the 'Cult of Personality' meme, shortened to 'cult' for those non-elitists out there. This has elevated the discussion and brought the candidates into sharp focus and made this election cycle an issues based campaign.

A sampling. Thank you google:

http://www.mlive.com/elections/index.ssf/2008/02/barack_obama_crowd_looks_like.html

Way to ruin half of my best Hillary conspiracy rants for the week. I so, so wanted to believe this, and I did for at least a couple of days. Them was some good days.

Ah well. At least I've still got Women's Voices Women Vote to get all frothy-mouthed about.

Thanks for the clarification. Jerk.

:)

Aside from the fact that I considered Blumenthal's e-mails to be private communications from a friend ...

I have no desire to read your e-mail or anyone else's. It always annoys the hell out of me to find that so-called friends have forwarded my private e-mails to others. What's up with that?

I remember feeling aghast that Glenn Greenwald revealed that he considered any e-mail to him fair game for posting since he assumed that everyone knew that missives to his address constituted a "professional" correspondence and were thus fair game. I reminded myself never to e-mail him.

Unless e-mail correspondence is for valid reasons subject to legal scrutiny, I hope we can all continue to presume upon some semblance of privacy -- or maybe not.

I read the HuffPo piece and kept expecting some smoking gun. There was none. It was writing about essentially nothing. I didn't even smell smoke.

I appreciate the clear and quick response. I assumed something like this was the case, but since this thing was zooming around all morning (with your name involved), I hoped Salon would provide an articulate response. Thanks again.

Marc Cooper, the frankly nutty Clinton hater who heads up the coverage of The Campaign at The Huffington Post no doubt had a field day with this. A few months back he had a nonsensical blog post about how his "pal" Mickey Klaus had caught Bluemnethal "red handed" engaging in dirty tricks. I guess this is what Cooper ment by "dirty tricks", sending out e-mails of varying degrees of relevance.

The last two paragraphs here come close to saying it: this no doubt all relates to the sour grapes these Clinton hating leftists have for Bluemental, who basicly forced them to become ninties versions of Joe McCarthy supporters in the Hitchens Impeachment Affair.

I guess the shame of going to bat for Hitchens as he sold out his friend for the likes of Ken Starr and Lindsey Graham must sting that much more at this point. As their hero Hitch has now told every possible lie in support of Bush in Iraq; Blumental's very existence must really rub it in: they simply aren't very smart.

I don't think Senator Obama needs your help or that of your colleague, Sidney Blumenthal. You are both insignificant people with nothing to offer anyone.

I don't think Senator Obama needs your help or that of your colleague, Sidney Blumenthal. You are both insignificant people with nothing to offer anyone.

I am not disagreeing with anything you said here, Joe, but you should definitely rethink your assumption that you know who is on Blumenthal's mailing list. It's stone-cold easy to have multiple mailing lists, depending on who your target audience is (I certainly do), and it's highly likely that Blumenthal would maintain multiple lists for multiple uses. He's not going to include a friend such as yourself, for example, on an campaign-internal email list.

Bottom line: you simply don't know who is on Blumenthal's lists and what material they are receiving unless you actually ask the recipients and see the emails (and even then, if you're a suspicious hacker type, you realize that addresses can be spoofed). So unless you've personally verified that neither Tapper nor Klein received the emails to which Dreier refers, it's not reasonable for you to assert that "the truth is that neither Tapper nor Klein was on his e-mail list." You simply don't know, Joe.

"Recitations of fact won't dissuade people who are determined, for their own opportunistic reasons, to promote conspiracy theories about Blumenthal and to impute some kind of "guilt" to anyone associated with him. I know because I've been through all this before on a much larger scale.

It is easy to pretend that Obama's political problems are somehow Blumenthal's fault or the fault of a dozen people who received his e-mails. The only problem is it's not true -- and the accusations won't help Obama. "

Toward the end you sound a bit defensive. I don't mean to be opportunistic, but as a voter I really want a Democrat to win this year. If there are legitimate reasons to "vet" obama, then I'm fine with that. But this kind of smear assault that has been going on, with your friend Blumenthal at the fore, is that to help the Democratic Party? Is that to help your integrity as a journalist?

If Obama's campaign were sending out e-mails asking you to re-investigate the women who Bill might or might not have been having sex with since 2000 (because the Republicans will...) would you act on it, or would you expose them for abetting the Republican agenda--with no good cause? If the only reason you need to investigate something is because the Republicans will, then you could always look into the perpetually floating allegations of Hillary Clinton being a lesbian...if we're looking for shallow issues that voters might "care" about, then why not go for the gold standard?

I'm joking, but pessimistic about this whole process at this point. I'm frustrated with the fact that the Clintons appear to have decided that the best way for them to win this election is to prod journalists to apply "Clinton Rules" equally to all Democrats. To be fair, I can see why they don't want to be the only ones, but applying, let's call them Democratic Party rules to Democratic candidates--no matter who they are--isn't helping this country, nor is it helping voters to decide who to vote for based on accurate information. And some journalists are to blame for buying into it....whether it is smearing coming from or going toward the Clinton camp. Which journalists were defending Al Gore from the false allegation that he said that he invented the internet in 2000? Which journalists were licking the barbecue off their fingers with common working class man John McCain? Which journalists were repeating the false allegation that voters who support Barack Obama in this campaign primary are similar to members of a cult who think of him as a messianic leader?

Further, stating that this is only something Obama will have to deal with is untrue. If McCain is elected, we all have to deal with the consequence. When will the media vet McCain in the same way that it has "vetted" Obama? My guess is that it never will. How easy it is to be a Republican. You only need to defeat a Democratic caricature....

It can be reduced to formula:

Democratic nominee + phony + elitist + liar + unpatriotic + (something specific and particularly nasty like said he invented the internet, or speaks french, or had a long friendship with an uncouth pastor or once worked in a communist law firm and lied about being shot at by Bosnian sniper fire) = unelectable.

Republican victory a piece of cake. And the idea that added garbage won't float up to greet Clinton if she does win the nomination is far from proven. I can almost guarantee that every pardon Bill Clinton gave at the end of his term will be re-examined by the GOP and his "abetting terrorists" will certainly be linked with his wife's candidacy, possibly in a campaign commercial. And "liar" will be re-mentioned continually, with new examples sought out and brought up and examined ad nausaeum.

Maybe the idea isn't that we should be equally unfair to all Democratic candidates...but that we have to start being (wait for it) equally fair to them. This isn't just about candidates or which journalists have friends working for various campaigns. Voters deserve no less than the truth, and frankly many journalists have failed us through the last two elections when it comes to equal treatment.

How about something different this year--starting now?