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. (more…)