If you wonder who exactly is this Jeffrey Price, see Lambert’s post here.

Dear Jeffrey:

In general, here at Corrente we don’t make invidious assumptions about the personal qualities of individuals we don‘t know, so no, we don’t think you are soulless. Speaking for myself, I welcome your explanation, late though it was, and I appreciate its friendly tone.

Somewhere it would have been nice if you had acknowledged the possibility that there was some wrongness on the part of you and your fun-loving conspirators, with the same frankness that Lambert acknowledged and apologized for the fact that we were had. .

On the other hand, the notion that one of your objectives was “retribution” for Lambert and this blog having been “apparently… more interested in digging up a scandal than finding the truth,” is truly angering.

Where have you been living during the past six years?

The assumption that that the Bush administration is fully capable of doing all within its power, legally and not, to keep the American people from knowing how they are being governed is neither a bizarre nor a partisan assumption. At this point, I think it fair to say that it is a reasonable, historical one. “Truth” is the hardest thing to pry out of this administration. The difference between a blog like Corrente, and someone like Michelle Malkin is that she thinks it’s okay for the Bush administration to behave this way, in contravention, often, of the constitution, which is why she wrote a book suggesting that we take a second look at the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, with an eye to protecting ourselves from Muslim-Americans, while we don’t accept either that behavior or Malkin’s rather odd notions of American history.

The mistake we made, as I see it, was to think that it would be so easy to find the evidence of Rovian conspiracy, not the assumption that Rove et al constantly overstep the bounds of both decency and legality, although, considering that the Republican congress provided no oversight for the last six years, and indeed, covered for the administration countless times, it wasn’t that hard to believe that maybe, just maybe, this one time Rove got sloppy.

By your own account, Lambert’s natural skepticism and his attempts to find the truth were thwarted at every turn by a conscious conspiracy to keep those who might have taken the bait from being able to tell that this was a deliberate set-up. You don’t get to dictate which means are the legitimate ones in a search for the truth, and as Lambert has mentioned, he doesn’t do phone calls, so your making that the test of whether or not he was interested in the truth was inoperable in his case.

The notion that the TV in the background of the photo was a tell is ridiculous. You can barely see it, as reproduced in a blog: To how many people would it have been a real clue? I spent much of the Seventies in Europe; I’ve never even heard of Land of the Lost. That tell was just another ruse meant to give you deniability, when you finally revealed your “prank.”

Seems to me you are hardly in a position to lecture us on “the search for truth.” You and your pals set a deliberate trap, and then assumed that anyone who was attentive enough to notice must be a partisan conspiracy nut, and in order to show that, you withheld information even when directly questioned. And as others have mentioned, what kind of April Fool’s prank lasts for four days?

Michelle Malkin reproduced a good portion of Lambert’s post which attempted to lay out the technical evidence that justified aroused suspicions; she labeled it “fevered.” That’s nothing new, all liberals are unhinged according to Malkin. But perhaps you weren’t the most sensitive reader of that post, precisely because you aren’t a regular Corrente reader. For instance, when Lambert says, “it would be irresponsible not to speculate,” he’s making a reference to the studied reluctance of the MSM to notice the more unsavory aspects of the Bush administration, a reluctance that persists to this day. [I’m also quoting Peggy Noonan on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal during the VRWC’s attack on Clinton.—Lambert] That statement is a key trope in the liberal blogosphere, but read without a knowledge of its underlying irony, it could seem to be an embrace of tin-foil speculation. What all of us have learned to accept, in the course of daily posting about this administration, is that you just can’t be too foily.

Do you know why we even know what we do about those eight fired US Attorneys? Not because of the SCLM. No, it’s because a journalist/blogger, Josh Marshall, who runs a blog mini-empire, insisted, on the basis of his knowledge of how this administration operates, that the firings deserved close scrutiny. Although Josh is a professional journalist himself, he was lectured by Jay Carney of Time, posting on Time’s own new political blog, “Swampland,” that Josh and liberal bloggers were engaging in conspiracy theories. Carney has since apologized.

If you and your pals hadn’t gone to such lengths to snare bloggers into a trap that had the potential of casting serious aspersions on their reputations, your little prank wouldn’t have left such an unpleasant taste in our mouths.

I don’t mean this as a personal attack on you, Jeffrey, and I accept your assertion that you are of an independent mind when it comes to political issues. Still, the readiness to play fast and loose with the reputation of others, reminds me of what has become SOP for this administration and too much of the Republican Party. Let me provide you with two links to discussions worthy of your interest; Lance Mannion, writing a few weeks ago on his own blog, saw immediately what those eight firings said about this administrations way of doing business and his amusing but dead-on musings are entirely apropos of this discussion: Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger’s Report does a run-down on the “lies,” and there’s no other way to phrase it, Orrin Hatch told about Carol Lam, perhaps the best known of the fired USAs, just this last Sunday on Meet The Press.

I do realize that we were speculating about your business and its reputation, but there was an easy route for you to take to clear up the record and end our speculations. You could have emailed us, or otherwise contacted us via the internet to insist clearly that our speculations had no basis in fact, and to offer us supporting evidence. You could also have engaged Xan on her opinions about your portfolio. We have a very open posting policy and we would not have denied you a venue right here at Corrente to challenge our speculations or to defend both the artistic and the ethical reputation of Coptix. Your efforts in this regard provided only confusing and decidedly mixed messages.

The various Anons who have suggested that we should just admit we were had and shut-up about it already, we have admitted it, but that admission doesn’t mean that there are no further issues worthy of discussion.

I hope you do come back, Jeffrey, both as a reader, and if you wish to continue this discussion, as a poster.

Yours very truly,

Leah