Saw this nugget on The Drudge Report about Sidney Blumenthal's arrest in New Hampshire for DWI, and thought it a good time to connect some dots on him and the Clintons for those of you who didn't already know.
And yes, lest anyone ask out of mock concern for my health and safety, I really will be looking both ways TWICE before crossing busy Biscayne Blvd. in Aventura, once Hillary spin-meister Sidney Blumenthal gets here in the near future, since I'm positive that there'll be some sort of Hillary event before the vote on the 29th, perhaps via satellite, and it's hard to imagine that he won't be among the first to parachute in to help manage and corral the media.
Frankly, given the stakes involved for here due to the political calendar, she's really got no choice but to pull out all the stops, and everyone with any political common sense knows that the city of Aventura serves as a key Florida redoubt for her, full of deep-pocketed financial contributors as well as experienced condo commanders and political operatives.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Hillary supporter and Hallandale Beach mayor Joy Cooper even swings by to help lead the cheers for the Hillary ground troops in tandem with Aventura mayor Susan Gottlieb!
(See info on Aventura and Hallandale Beach contributors at
http://www.campaignmoney.com/finance.asp?type=iz&cycle=08&criteria=33180 ,
http://www.campaignmoney.com/finance.asp?type=iz&cycle=08&criteria=33009 , and
http://www.nohillaryclinton.com/2007/10/22/the-allure-of-stinking-campaign-cash/ )
I'll spare you the tangent that first popped into my head when I first saw the news about Sidney Blumenthal doing 70 in a 30 m.p.h. zone, and just give you my Reader's Digest-version take on this guy, whom I read for years in various places before Bill Clinton bit the bullet and announced he'd run for president afterall.
As much as I dislike Blumenthal and his brand of ethical musical chairs, where one day he's the observer and the next he's the personal advisor, there's no denying his ability to craft interesting pieces with well-chosen words and penetrating observations, even while noting how often they're incredibly cringe-worthy and self-serving at the same time.
But consider the sage advice Albert Brooks passed along to us in a great film I've only seen about three-dozen times, Broadcast News http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0092699/ , when discussing another articulate chronicler of news, in his wonderfully observed and dead-on portrayal of brainy news reporter Aaron Altman, smitten beyond all-hope with network news executive producer colleague Holly Hunter's Jane Craig, herself, somewhat bewildered by her own obvious attraction to William Hurt's Tom Grunick:
Aaron: I know you care about him. I've never seen you like this about anyone, so please don't take it wrong when I tell you that I believe that Tom, while a very nice guy, is the Devil.
Jane: This isn't friendship.
Aaron: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just, bit by little bit, lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance... Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women.
Aaron: I think we have the kind of friendship where if I were the devil, you'd be the only one I would tell.
(See also http://www.albertbrooks.com/ )
Of all the many prominent people I met over the roughly 15 years I lived in Washington, which included many folks at the WSJ, NYT and ABC-TV News that you'd probably recognize in a nanosecond if you're a real news junkie -as well as several others you'd eventually recognize with some time to place the face or voice- nobody in town was more widely reviled by them, collectively, than rapid Clinton apple-polisher Sid Blumenthal.
I'm not joking, either. Real visceral hate!
And it's not like the Washington of the Nineties lacked candidates, either.
See http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/1997/cyb19970703.asp
As it happens, back in the days when he was talking and acting more like a DLC Democrat that the person he's become since then, in 1988 I defied South Florida's supposed Democratic CW (conventional wisdom) about the electability of Michael Dukakis and voted for Al Gore during the FL primary on Super Tuesday, March 8th.
(Gore's senior thesis at Harvard was on "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency.")
After voting, I promptly drove up to Washington, listening to election returns on the radio throughout the South on my drive up, which had been my game plan all along.
Lots and lots of Charlotte's WBT and Nashville's flamethrower, WLAC, as well as many smaller stations reporting local races with just as much drama, intrigue and backbiting as farther up on the ballot. Lots of talk about whether Gore would be able to win in northern states!
Mostly, they were the very same radio stations I'd always listened to for American Top 40 with Casey Kasem (AT40) during its heyday, so I was a veritable walking-talking Billboard hit list by the time my drive north ended, just as I'd been on my drives down here and back from Indiana for spring break.
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Top_40 and
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/index.jsp )
(jingle and lines that are always in my head on long droves by myself)
"Casey's Coast-to-Coast!"
"Hi, I'm Casey Kasem on American Top 40, coming to you on great radio stations like...
We're counting down the top hits...
Now on with the countdown!...
The Newsweek post, below, about the arrest has already received lots of reader comments, which I haven't included here, but which are growing by the hour.
Hardly surprising that they tend to be both very mean-spirited and very funny!
As a point of information, in case you may've forgotten or perhaps never knew, Blumenthal and his wife sued Matt for $30 Million. Result?
Blumenthal was forced to pay Drudge to get out of the lawsuit!
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/sid.htm
Even more delicious than the Newsweek piece, though, is this take on Blumenthal from The New York Observer, and what I think is the devastatingly accurate take on his political perch at The New Yorker by one very upset reader.
(Me, I generally preferred Elizabeth Drew's stories on the corrosive effects on the political system and government of money and lobbyists.)
That Newsweek online post jogged my memory about something I'd once seen about Sidney Blumenthal and a Miami Herald story from 2000 that he was shopping around to create some editorial ripples before 42 made way for 43.
After digging thru my old Yahoo! email archives and a trip or two thru the SouthBeachHoosier Time Machine, I found it, and have it below as well for your consideration.
I suspect that it'll confirm what many of you already think about how Washington works.
When you get a second, please check out yesterday's post on Prof. Eugene Volokh's savvy blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, http://volokh.com/ , long one of my favorites, about the refusal of Ms. magazine to run an ad and their rationale: Mid-East politics.
No, not the politics of people actually living in the Mid-East.
The Mid-East politics of their own readers!
___________________________________
http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/01/11/blumenthal-on-the-boil.aspx
Posted Friday, January 11, 2008 7:56 PM
Blumenthal On the Boil
Newsweek
contributed by Suzanne Smalley
______________________________________
http://www.observer.com/2008/blumenthal-it-was-policy-and-personality
Blumenthal: It Was Policy and Personality
By Jason Horowitz
January 9, 2008
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the Miami Herald's story from 2000 that Blumenthal tried to muster interest in around the country:
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a61ec4b0ec9.htm
Sid’s List (Blumenthal’s e-mail list)
http://www.southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/
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