Living in Matt Drudge’s World

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Ben Smith on the TSA backlash:

There’s no doubt about who won on this issue: Matt Drudge chose it and drove it, illustrating both his continued power and his great sense of the public mood, and it now seems a matter of time until he gets results. But the moment is also, a smart Democrat notes, representative of how this administration (and to be fair, everyone in public life) continues to wrestle with “populism as narrated by the Drudge Report.” There are some echoes of the Shirley Sherrod mess in the panicked, mixed reactions.

I know I’m totally off the reservation on this, which is a little weird since I’m usually a bit of a privacy crank. But I think liberals have been badly rolled on this. We’re usually better about letting ourselves get sucked into the Drudge vortex.

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