NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Benghazi-hearing Hillary and (in keeping with the Warner Brothers theme) the status of our friends the rightbloggers thereafter:

One thing I didn't get into much was the committee's Sidney Blumenthal fixation. As I noted Friday,  even Byron York called it a "near-obsession" because "his name was mentioned 60 times — before the first questioner had even finished." Yet Blumenthal's name was mentioned five times in York's own 865-word column, where York called him "notorious for his role as a Clinton acolyte... a provocateur and master of misdirection" -- as if to say, well, can you blame them?

Blumenthal's up there with Saul Alinsky now as a demonic figure whose name conservatives jump out from behind a bush and yell as if it will scare the voters, most of whom don't know who the hell they're talking about. Why did the committee fall for it? In part because rightbloggers made Blumenthal part of movement mythology -- hell, your grandma who gets those emails from scamsters with "Liberty" or "Freedom" in their titles has probably heard more about Sidney Blumenthal than you have.  And when it was revealed Blumenthal had an interest in a military contractor that might get work from a future post-Gaddafi government in Libya (where currently you're more likely to make money selling tourniquets), National Review announced that Blumenthal was "using his close ties to the then-secretary of state to profit from the 2011 American intervention," as if he were seen running from the scene of the crime with bags marked "$."

It's weak beer, and somewhere Dick Cheney is laughing his ass off; but guys like RedState author Moe Lane take it very seriously and, in their role as tribunes of the sheeple, demanded the committee react:

This is, in the end, about people dying. And not just Americans; Sidney Blumenthal allegedly profited off helping to start a civil war. The Democrats are focused on the absolute essentials in this situation: do the same, or you will lose. And you will have lost stupidly. We have no more time for stupid. 

Thus commanded, the committee manfully marched into the guns of derision, then went home to tell the boys they'd done their duty and collect campaign contributions. Don't forget to read the column.