I wrote about the reemergence of Sydney Blumenthal today in Politico:
For those who don’t remember the 1990s, Sidney Blumenthal is the former writer for the New Republic, the Washington Post and The New Yorker whose devotion to the Clintons was too much even for his fellow journalists.
He had been writing “Letter from Washington” for The New Yorker but lost the gig because he wrote about the Clintons with the clear-eyed objectivity of an RT reporter covering one of Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested hunting adventures.
Soon enough, Blumenthal traded in his status as a quasi-Clinton apparatchik for official Clinton apparatchik, taking a job at the White House.
There is nothing new in human history about courtiers. If James I could have his Duke of Buckingham, Bill and Hillary could have their Sidney Blumenthal. But the whiff of venom attended much of what Blumenthal did. He was noted for his conspiratorial thinking and nasty, highly personalized, whisper-campaign politics. Much can be learned about his smash-mouth style by studying the social behavior of the spotted hyena.