Arriving unbidden on THE SCRAPBOOK'S desk last week -- who knows how many layers of forwarding removed from its original and unknown recipient -- was a most interesting copy of an e-mail recently sent by White House staff ideologist Sidney Blumenthal. The actual message in that e-mail is for present purposes inconsequential: It's just a full-text copy of a late December Miami Herald story on the "undervote" in Florida's majority-black voting precincts. What's truly interesting about the document, instead, is something that a quirk of Blumenthal's office computer has revealed: the full roster of people to whom the e-mail was addressed. The delightful result? Having inadvertently acquired Blumenthal's Miami Herald missive, THE SCRAPBOOK seems also to have acquired a longish list of folks through whom he likes to spread his special brand of "information."
The list surpasses self-parody. Its first two names: Clinton-ophantic columnists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. Followed by, among others: Jane Mayer and Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker; Jill Abramson, Eleanor Randolph, and Anthony Lewis at the New York Times; "Greta" at cnn.com; Harold Evans of U.S. News; and Sean Wilentz of Princeton and Todd Gitlin of NYU.
Speaking of academics, THE SCRAPBOOK is puzzled by the presence in such company of Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago, who is, as he himself has recently written to this magazine, an extremely non-partisan fellow, motivated only and always by principle. Go figure.
Go figure, too, the inclusion on Sidney's list of columnists John Judis, Michael Tomasky, and Robert Scheer. And a couple of people at the online magazine Salon. And Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe. And unsuccessful author David Brock. And so on, and so on, and so on. None of these esteemed ladies and gentlemen would ever actually take instruction from a Blumenthal e-mail. Would they?
One other question, come to think of it: What official, government business could Sidney Blumenthal possibly have been performing when he wrote and mailed this thing while at work in the White House?