This is weird. Earlier today I linked to a supposed post by Michael Barone attacking the Bush administration over the fired attorneys scandal. It certainly seemed out of character, given the tone of Barone’s commentary over recent years. Some readers have been pointing out that though the post itself shows up on the specific URL, it doesn’t show up on the main blog page. The post in question very much seems to reside on the US News website. It’s not an instance of spoofing. But Michael Barone has confirmed to Andrew Sullivan that he did not write the post. According to Sullivan, relaying on Barone I assume, a hacker got into Barone’s site and inserted the post.
Late Update: Well, it’s hard to know at this point with the US News blogging platform. But it appears now that the non-post from Michael Barone actually wasn’t a hack. It shows up right there on the front page of Bonnie Erbe’s US News blog. So perhaps it’s a glitch rather than a hoax? Given it’s a US News blog, at this point I’m not making any assumptions.
(ed.note: Here at TPM we were noting that this did seem like very much a niche sort of hacking, with a rather rarefied audience. Imagine the chatter on the hacker underground discussion boards: “Dude! Just uploaded a sane post on the US Attorney story to BARONE’s blog! Freaky …”
