Rathergate anniversary

Power Line reminds us that September 9 is the anniversary of the blogosphere's deconstruction and destruction of the attempted exposé of Sixty Minutes on Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard.

Here is the original Power Line post (with updates). You might remember the flurry of activity that day, when a bunch of bloggers and about a million readers with too much time on their hands proved that the CBS documents were forgeries.

Power Line is a great example of how things have changed as a result. Before then, Power Line was a pretty popular and very interesting blog, which I enjoyed a lot. The three bloggers were amazingly accessible. For instance, I once had an email exchange with Scott Johnson (using my real name) about one of his posts. He later updated his post with a quotation from my email. In the course of our exchange, he mentioned that he remembered hearing my father speak in St. Paul circa 1972.

Today, Power Line is still a fine blog, but to me it's lost some of its intimacy. The national attention it received as a result of Rathergate has thrust it into the top echelon, with greatly increased readership, and various pundit gigs for the three bloggers. It's no longer possible for them to respond to everyone who writes in, let alone to me (and I've tried blog name, real name, and various email addresses). This is good for them -- their success is, I mean -- even though, sad to say, they've felt the need to drop their nicknames in deference to their stature. But, while I still read the blog, I really do miss the old version.