Leave it to Andrew Sullivan.  It’s been 24 hours since I offered $100,000 for the full list and contents of the Ezra Klein’s four-year experiment in political-journalist editorial collusion — the on line progressive jazz fusion station known as JournoList.  A natural free for all of death-wishing upon their political enemies and other such innocuous scribblings.

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It took 24 hours for Sullivan to proclaim that all the rules now were broken.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today’s right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It’s about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet’s ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

In fact, when one of the progressives on this list outed Dave Weigel, the actual rules were broken.  That leaker who destroyed Weigel’s career had agreed to the off-the-record nature of the 400-strong list; the minute the leaker went public with the material the story was no longer about Weigel but about the JournoList itself.

I was not invited to participate in that list for obvious reasons.  I am not bound by those rules.  Unless you are going to tell me that in the future, journalists are forever bound not to report information that others have agreed would remain private, you are holding me to a standard that no one else in the media would ever agree to.  Such a standard would allow corporate, government and military malfeasance to flourish and would certainly prevent stories like the Risen and Lichtblau exposes in the New York Times from ever being published; even though the programs were top-secret, the Times was not bound by any privacy agreement.

Why was Mickey Kaus not excoriated for breaking the sacred JournoList bond when he posted a series of leaked emails that showed collusion against not-liberal-enough New Republic editor Marty Peretz for his crime of sticking up for Israel?

Kausfiles has obtained a copy of one JournoList discussion, focusing on New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz (for whom I once worked.) This is not a parody! It’s the real thing. I don’t know whether or not it is representative. I’ve edited it only to remove potentially defamatory passages–those cuts are marked–and left out various boilerplate links and commands embedded in the thread, such as “Print” and “Report this message.” … I won’t add my own commentary, at least for now. Find your own lede! … Reminder to JournoList organizer E. Klein, who likes to take it private: All communications are on the record. …

Most information of value is held by people that don’t want it to be public.  Not that anyone asked, but I would never divulge information discovered that was not pertinent to my stated mission, which is to point out the collusion between the political left and a journalist class that improbably claims there is no such thing as media bias and who dismiss those who accuse the media of having a left wing agenda as paranoid conspiracy theorists.

I would never divulge an individual’s sexual secrets.  I did not learn that rule in journalism school, I learned that from my conscience.  Something that I have come to realize is lacking in those journalists who claim out of one side of their mouth that they are objective reporters, but then seek the privacy of clubs, cliques and listservs, etc., to fight back against those that would challenge their false “objective order.”

When the talking points of the press match up with each other to the degree that they have in recent years,when the lexicon is virtually identical, when major stories are collectively ignored and the minor ones are collectively inflated, everyone notices.

The election of Barack Obama was facilitated by a corrupt Fourth Estate.  It didn’t get corrupted by accident.  The political left, on its self-proclaimed Long March Through the Institutions, walked in the front door, took control, and since has done everything in its power to keep it, including secretly massing on the Internet,  sharing notes, sharing ideas.. and wishing death to their political enemies.

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I needn’t be lectured by a so-called “conservative” who has aided and abetted in this perversion of the American political experiment.  Sullivan’s disgusting, ends-justify-the-means obsession with the personal family life of Sarah Palin breached every ethical and journalistic boundary known to the cosmos.  Between airing Palin’s hacked private emails and making a cottage industry out of challenging the maternity of her son, Trig, sometimes the word “irony” or “hypocrisy” is not descriptive enough.

To highlight the absurdity of Sullivan’s outrage, perhaps his submission entitled “The Palin Emails” can grant you insight into a demented mind. Before divulging them in at least five separate posts, he wrote:  ”They’ve leaked, of course. And they’re not pretty.”

And they weren’t meant to be public either, Andy.

To think I was once his biggest advocate, but now he’s an incomprehensible ‘marm. In the transparent world of conservative journalism, conservatives admit their biases; in the world in which Sullivan now curries favor, he sidles up to the ends-justify-the-means left that exposed his sexual tastes in order to put him in his place. These are the Alinsky monsters whom I seek to flash a light on.

Perhaps Sullivan and Charles Johnson should share a townhouse in the bizarro editorial no-man’s land that they both now inhabit.