It’s beyond hackneyed to point out that technology is a precarious and unpredictable thing. Coulter constantly talks about Lexis-Nexis, but it’s the availability of Google and Google Cache – free to tens of millions of energized individuals – that has dramatically increased the risk of any kind of dishonesty. And if you’re a controversial ex-President talking about the single most important issue of our age, it’s a very bad idea to throw around accusations of conspiracy when someone implies that you may spent eight years kicking the can of Islamofascism down the road. First, the blogosphere will fact check your ass [insert too-predictable-to-be-funny punch line about Clinton and ass-groping]. Then the blogosphere will follow up their fact-checking of your ass by gleefully posting video of really smart judges fact checking same. And then a major blog will arrange for your former adviser Dick Morris to describe to a bunch of other bloggers qua megaphones that (a) you probably were being a little intellectually dishonest and (b) even the maybe-excusing-your-behavior-possibility that you were overwhelmed by your emotions is just a cynical and calculated ploy (apparently Stephanopoulos has worked out an entire taxonomy of how Clinton pretends to lose control in different ways for different situations).
And so, yesterday was the latest OneJerusalem.org conference call – it put political uber-guru Dick Morris in the center of a gaggle of enthusiastic bloggers (“enthusiastic” is a serious understatement – given how people on this call were and are talking about him, the conference should have been a meltdown of people excitedly trying to ask questions all on top of each other… that it was actually probably the best behaved OJ.org conference call in the last two months suggests that there is something deeply flawed about our current understanding of the human psyche). And for once, we can actually give you a complete list of participants (which we only have because we sandbagged finishing this post and stole the list of the One Jerusalem writeup). Participants: Allen Roth (OneJerusalem.org), Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Pamela (Atlas Shrugs – a blog that Dick Morris can recognize by name, for those of you considering whether it’s worth your time to RSS it), Don (Liberally Conservative), Anne Lieberman (Boker Tov, Boulder – aka “the woman who will never talk to us ever again”), Jerry Gordon (Israpundit), Michael Illions and Hank Butehorn (Conservatives With Attitude), Banagor (Broadsword – make sure you read his mid-month concise and brutal dismantling of Papal Jihad apologists), Kim Priestap (Wizbang), and Chad (GDLL).
Many of these people have written summaries of the call, and some of them are actually quite extensive (One Jersualem on background, Pamela on Dick Morris and blogging, Kim Priestap on Hillary vs. Gore and Bill vs. Hillary, Jim Hoft on just about everything). We want to focus on a few things that we think are still being somewhat underemphasized, and we’ll do it over the next several posts to keep things from getting unwieldy.
