Drudge: Five Years After

It's the summer of 2003. We rent a rustic 18th century farmhouse across the street from the swan park in Peapack, NJ. The house has original floor boards (once a month we have to walk around the house and hammer the nails back in), 19th century door handles and old fashioned farm closets. The house sits on 2 .5 acres, shaded by a couple of massive trees, airy in the summer actually, but cold in the winter. The Delaware born Mrs. Stroock is still wincing from her first northeastern winter in the place.

We've finished our work for the day, grad school stuff and writing what will become A Line through the Desert. Things are really coming together and we know it.

We're sitting down in the afternoon to get our news. We start at the Drudge report, world famous after he broke the Clinton-Lewisnky affair.

From their we go to Andrew Sullivan, the first blogger we ever read. Then over to NRO's The Corner. After that Mickey Kaus, who we knew from his New Republic Days. After that a blog called Captain's Quarters (now Hot Air), and then Powerline. We've just discovered Instapundit. 

We've completely abandoned the TV news, though we'll watch a bit of Fox. We now laugh at the notion of newspapers. Imus? We wish he'd go fall off a horse, again.

A year later CBS published the Killian fake memo about W.'s national guard service. 

We watched what happen next unfold in real time. Powerline noticed the memo supposedly written in 1972 was super-scripted. Little Green Footballs, before Charles Johnson lost his mind, made an exact duplicate of the memo in MS Word. The Weekly Standard found a website dedicated to old typewriters whose owner explained that typewriters did nor super-script letters. Drudge picked up the story by noon the next day. That night the sham doc was on Fox...