No, this isn't a "concern" post. If you don't know what I mean here, look around. Looks like Mr. Blumenthal has been working hammer and tong to proliferate all sorts of right-wing psycho rumors about Senator Obama. Y'know, the ones that say he's a Manchurian candidate Islamofascist mole who hates America when not on drugs and intends to sell the Sixth Fleet to Osama etc etc etc.

I read a lot of his books, and did a long interview with him back in '03. This part jumps out:

WRP: A great deal of what the right puts out into the mainstream news media comes from think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. They have a fearsome machine for crafting and disbursing messages. Why haven't Democrats developed the same political infrastructure the right has?

SB: In the 1980s, I studied the rise of conservative infrastructure. I wrote a book about it that was published in 1986 called 'The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.' When I was a reporter with the Washington Post, the Post published many of my reports about this. It was considered to be a revelation by people, but the right had already been devoting decades to this, and it?s been now decades since I first did that basic reporting. The right's infrastructure is now far larger than, I think, all but a few people understand.

I believe they spend about one quarter of a billion dollars a year on this infrastructure. Their funding is highly centralized and coordinated; call it a 'Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy' if you like, but it is done through a small group of people who generally direct funds to dozens of right-wing groups including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, and so on. There is nothing like it beyond the right.

The reason for this is that, for may years, people thought the right was on the margins, on the fringe, not to be taken seriously. Part of that is because there is very little genuine scholarship going on over on the right. There are a lot of polemics, a lot of ideological sharpshooting, a lot of tendentious studies done that use and manipulate statistics. The Heritage Foundation doesn't have a single scholar of any standing. AEI is filled with the likes of Richard Perle and Robert Bork. Liberals, if you will, believe in the broad-based institutions of American society, including universities. The right wing is doing everything it can to polarize every single institution it can, from the media to the academy, and now trying to consume even religion in its ideological wars.

You can see that through the heavily-funded, carefully targeted splitting of religions by the right, such as the Episcopal Church over the gay bishop. All of that is funded and directed, part of a strategy. Do not doubt it. Now, the Methodists are targeted. The Southern Baptists convention was turned in the 1980s. Its very theology, on the question of abortion, was altered. It was altered directly by a political aide sitting in the Reagan White House as it was being re-written. Such is the priesthood of the believer.

Democrats have only lately come to this realization that there is such a conservative infrastructure, that it has an enormous impact on politics, and that it is fully integrated into, and even taken over, parts of the Republican party.

One of the glitches in the Democratic state of mind was that the accusations against the Clintons were somehow just about the Clintons. There had to be something to it, because where there is smoke, there is fire. There were so many accusations. How could it all be untrue? After all, the Clintons came from darkest Arkansas. There had to be something wrong, some dark spot in their background. And so the Democrats believed it was about the Clintons personally. Then Al Gore ran for President, an Eagle Scout. And he was transformed into a liar and an exaggerator, though the charges against him were lies and exaggerations. Then Tom Daschle, a mild person of integrity, was demonized as lacking patriotism. Then Max Cleland, the Senator from Georgia who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was conflated with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and was too stunned and shocked even to reply. He lost his seat, the one seat that was the margin in turning the Senate.

So, the Democrats have slowly and belatedly come to the realization that the whole campaign to grab power against them may not be about individual persons and their foibles. Maybe its about power itself, and the Republican impulse and will to power.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/120803A.sh...

I don't have any bad feelings because he's working for Senator Clinton; I'd be frankly surprised if he wasn't. But he gets whackeed for driving drunk, and now he's taking pages out of the very same playbook he concentrated years of scholarship on exposing and denouncing.

Bums me out.