Garance Franke-Ruta has a ridiculous article in the American Prospect arguing a la Dan Rather that the bloggers who brought down Eason Jordan and exposed RatherGate are partisan Republican activists disguising themselves as independent citizen bloggers.

Don’t waste your time reading the whole thing. This one paragraph is all you need to read to understand where Franke-Ruta is coming from:

Power Line, another conservative blog deeply involved in the Rather controversy, helped push the Jordan story as well. Described by Time magazine as “three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium [who] challenged a network news legend and won,” Power Line was voted Time’s “2004 Blog of the Year.” In reality, its three writers are all fellows at the conservative Claremont Institute who attended Dartmouth College in the early 1970s and now work as attorneys; two of them have been writing articles as a team for conservative publications such as the National Review and The American Enterprise for more than 10 years.

Over on Kevin Drum’s site, Joe M. responds to this smear in the comments section:

Oooohh, scary. They are fellows at the Claremont Institute (meaning, they get to have their names on a masthead somewhere as thanks for their donations). They went to Dartmouth and work as attorneys! Clearly, these are not real “citizens.” And they’ve even been known to publish articles in conservative magazines! Who would have ever thought that a blogger might be the type of person who is interested in writing!

Has Powerline no shame? I can think of nothing more contemptible, really. To think, here they are posing as citizens who happen to be interested in writing their thoughts, when in reality they are Dartmouth-educated attorneys who have written for publications before!

Drum, who ought to know better, endorses the Franke-Ruta article:

Bottom line: a large part of the conservative blogosphere is nothing more than old style slime artists with a shiny new medium to abuse, while another large part either wittingly or unwittingly passes along their swill as a supposed groundswell of grass roots outrage. Peek underneath the rock and it’s not a pretty sight.

What we have here is indeed not a pretty sight, but not in the way Drum thinks.

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More commentary: Pejmanesque, Mike Krempasky, Josh Trevino, and Blue State Conservatives.

Plus: Blackfive and Bill Roggio and Cheryl at Easongate respond to the smears.

More: Tom Maguire’s takedown, “Meanwhile back at the grassy knoll,” is hilarious. (His related smiting of Kevin Drum is also delicious.)