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...

Twenty Years Ago: The Day After Drudge

In January of 1998 we were vaguely aware of Matt Drudge.

One morning we got in our Saturn and drove down to the 7-11 to pick up a coffee and some Marlboro Lights. We put the radio on Imus and just before the commercials came on we heard the tail end of Charles McChord saying something about Clinton and an intern, we really didn't catch what it was all about.

Around 1 PM we turned the TV on and saw White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry deflecting Lewinsky related questions.

And so it began, the long year of Bill and Monica.

Who wouldn't want that year back?  

As noted before 1998 was the worst year of our life. Clinton-Lewinsky was the background to year in which we dropped out of college, endured bouts of unemployment, held a dead end job, and an appendectomy. 'You idiot! It's in the back of the book!' Our fiancee admonished when we asked where the appendix is.

That year saw a cold winter and a really hot summer. We know because we were life guarding, $6:15 an hour folks, ten hour days. We had the 8-6 shift. No one showed up for a couple of hours at least. That summer we burned through the American Heritage series.

The gig paid our half of the rent and the utilities. Back then our idea of the high life was Red Lobster. So we were doing OK. We used the pool's sionaric acid to clean our basement bachelor shower when our fiancee moved in. We still have a chlorine burn on our calf from daily bucket dumps into effluent tank. 

For a while our pool was real popular with the 30ish mom set. We were 24, tan, 30 pounds lighter than today, and walked around lifting a fifteen pound dumbbell. We tanned real nice too, turning a nice apricot color.  A shirt? We had no need for one.  Once we walked passed two moms at the baby pool and heard one of them ask the other, 'Tempted?' Damn right they were tempted.

Younger reader(s) will not be aware that once the Monica story broke official Washington assumed Clinton would have to resign. By the next Monday Clinton made his famous statement, 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms.Lewinsky...' He was lying of course, we all knew he was lying. 

We spent the whole year wondering if he was really going to get away with it. He did.

Soon after we got our gig at CNN. The residue of the impeachment was all over the joint. 

Those poor bastards still had no idea what Drudge was doing to their industry. Neither did we, and 1999 was a pretty long year too.

20 Years Later, the Media Still Sucks

Twenty Years Ago Today Matt Drudge published this exclusive:

Web Posted: 01/17/98 23:32:47 PST -- NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN 
BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT 
**World Exclusive****Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT** 
At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States! 

Most people get this story wrong.

Drudge's target wasn't President Clinton. It was Newsweek. The magazine thought of every excuse it could to spike Michael Isakoff's  story. 

It's an old story, the media helping Dems.

When James O'Keefe took his ACORN tapes to Andrew Breitbart, he said, 'We're going to nail ACORN.' Breitbart replied, 'No, we're going to nail the media.'

And so they did.

Today Drudge thrives while Newsweek has slashed its page numbers in half.

By the way, we write for magazines that have maintained their page numbers and actually expanded over the same period that Newsweek has shrunk.

To quote Andrew Breitbart (PBUH) once more, 'It's not your business model that sucks. It you that sucks.

Drudge is Always Right

More interesting scenes from the Esquire election day oral history.

Steve Bannon tells us:

The exit polls were horrific. It was brutal. I think we were close in Iowa and Ohio and everything else was just brutal. Losing everywhere. Florida, Pennsylvania. I mean, it looked like a landslide.

And:

Jared [Kushner] and I were out on this balcony in Trump Tower. We looked at it on Jared’s iPhone. And the numbers were so bad that we regrouped inside. We look at each other and we go, “This can’t be right. It just can’t.” And Jared goes, “I got an idea, let’s call Drudge.” And Drudge says, “The corporate media—they’ve always been wrong the entire time—these numbers are wrong.”

Ahhh....this takes us back to an overcast day in November of 2004, election day in fact.

We were driving back from Borders after having spent a few hours there working on A Line Through the Desert. On the radio we learned that someone had leaked the early exit polls and they showed Jean Francois le Kerrie (D-Fr) winning.

For us, anyway, something wonderful happened. Newt Gingrich was on the radio with Hannity explaining how and why the numbers in those polls made no sense. For example they showed a sample radically skewed with women voters.

From there the word went out. A lot of conservative blogs picked up on Newt and argued the polls were faulty. The Corner at National Review was particularly important in this effort, as back then it was something of a conservative information clearing house.

And so the word went forth, ignore these skewed polls, obviously leaked to demoralize and depress Republican turnout, and get out and vote.

That was nice.

Go back and read the Bannon quotes. They called Drudge, who set them straight.

Remember, always trust Drudge.

The Media is Decadent and Depraved: The Weinstein Chronicles

Yesterday The New Yorker published a story by Ronan Farrow detailing more sexual misdeeds by Hollywood sex pervert Harvey Weinstein.

Farrow tells us:

For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence.

Via The Daily Caller we learn that Farrow's bosses at NBC passed on the story:

Appearing on the Rachel Maddow Show Tuesday night, the MSNBC host asked Farrow why his story — in which multiple women allege sexual assault and rape over decades against the Democratic Party mega-donor — didn’t get reported through NBC News.

Remember NBC and the rest of their ilk in the decrepit media went wall to wall with President Trump's 'pussy' tape.

Recall also that the perverts at The New York Times spiked a story on Weinstein in 2004.

Let's go back even further.

In 1998 Newsweek spiked a story by Michael Isaakof about Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern. Isaakof took the story to Drudge, and the rest is history.

The media will always hide sexual escapades of their fellow Democrats.

And some wonder why we call them communist sex criminals.

Democrat in good standing

Tuesday Tally Comes Skulking in Late

Most Important Political Influences Edition

Well here they are:

-Alan Alda

-Rob Reiner

-Rush Limbaugh

-PJ O'Rourke

-Matt Drudge

-Mark Steyn

-Andrew Breitbart (PBUH)

Twenty five years ago William Stroock was a Conservative Democrat looking forward to Bill Clinton's inauguration. Now he was never a lefty. He favored all kinds of government action at home but also wanted a strong military. He supported the Gulf War, he  hated communism, two things that will get you primaried in today's Democrat party. In fact, in his famous 1993 English 101 Essay, 'The 1992 Presidential Campaign, a panoramic view of a myriad of divergent choices' he specifically stated, 'If it comes down to Bush and some schmuck Democrat, I'm voting for Bush'.

A few years ago in the faculty lounge a very leftwing colleague of mine who now runs something called the Hunterdon County Anti-Racism Coalition asked, upon hearing this asked, 'So what happened.'

'Well,' I replied as I adjusted my tie, 'I guess I fell in with the wrong crowd.'

In a way that's true. Because in the spring of 1993 I was hanging out with a guy who would later be my post college roommate and wedding usher, and he listened to Rush Limbaugh while we played Madden on his Sega. My buddy is now a lobbyist, btw. My most important take away from Rush was to be a happy warrior. Have fun. I always did so teaching, ok not with those little bastard Orthodox Yeshiva students.

While Limbaugh was it important, that summer I's already read what was for me a landmark book: Give War a Chance by PJ O'Rourke. Here was an irreverent baby boomer making fun of the world's crisis, retelling his own time in the Balto-Cong in 1970 and poking holes in a lot of the things I took for granted. He slammed We Are the World (its a Gen X thing, guys) and showed how it was pointless and dangerous and above all, stupid:

We are the world [solipsism], we are the children [average age forty].
We are the ones to make a brighter day [unproven], so let’s start giving [logical inference supplied without argument].
There’s a choice we’re making, so let’s start giving [true as far as it goes].
We’re saving our own lives [absurd].
It’s true we’ll make a better day [see line 2 above],
Just you and me [statistically unlikely].
That’s three palpable untruths, two dubious assertions, and nine uses of a first person pro-noun, not a single reference to trouble and anybody in it and no facts. The verse contains, literally, neither rhyme nor reason. And these musical riots of philanthropy address themselves to the wrong problems.

Going back even further, I'd say yuuge influences were Alana Alda and Rob Reiner (meathead).  I Every night of my childhood they were on channel 5 at 7 and 7:30, I mean every goddamn night. I just got sick of listening to them bad mouth American. I never need to see All in the Family again, but I really need to go back and give MASH a binge watch.

Moving on to manhood we come to Matt Drudge. He broke the Lewinsky story, of course and showed just how corrupt the media was, simply through his editorial choices. Simple really,and going strong. A real news man in the old style.

Mark Steyn. Like everyone else in America I hadn't heard of him till after 9/11. There's really no point in my trying to pick a few examples those interested should just go to his website or CRTV where he has new show. I've most importantly followed and participated in his crusade against the Canadian Human Rights Commission and now the climate fraudster Dr. Michael Mann. Free speech at any price.

Finally there's Andrew Breitbart, He began as Drudge's partner in crime and branched out or exploded out, anyway. I knew Breitbart was important after the California Prop-8 initiative when he challenged the screaming homosexuals to 'Protest a Mosque'. I was hooked. He knew me, though he never met me, and I sure knew him. I wept openly the day he died and am getting a little teary just writing this. I know he would love the way I found out, via Drudge. I can still see the screen now.

Breitbart taught me that enemy was the institutional left. He taught me how to fight it. He taught me the media is scum. He's no doubt  looking down from heavens with a giant smile. and an extended middle finger.