The Los Angeles Times "outed" Buckhead Friday night.
Last week, you may have seen what we reported on Countdown about the leader of the Blog pack who so quickly and with such surprising skill went after the dicey Killian Memos produced (and I mean that in both ways) by CBS News. His posts to FreeRepublic left the tracks of some of his identity, and we noted it: his Georgia base (hence the on-line handle), his contention that he was highly placed among Republican attorneys, his on-call status in the event that Bush '04 needed lawyers the way Bush '00 needed lawyers.
The L.A. Times connected the rest of the dots, and would that they drew a nice easy-to-digest picture of some lawyer/computer geek, or lawyer/typewriter fancier, or any of the other healthy fanatics the blogosphere has produced.
Nope.
This one's a Conservative activist with a connection to Ken Starr.
Harry W. MacDougald, of Atlanta, the law firm of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, the Federalist Society, and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, admitted he is "Buckhead" when the Times found him Friday, but would say nothing else. "You can ask the questions but I'm not going to answer them."
So, we'll ask anyway. There sure are a lot to ask.
They're mostly about that Southeastern Legal Foundation. It was the group that petitioned the Arkansas bar to revoke, or suspend, President Clinton's license to practice law, based on his false testimony in the Paula Jones case. Buckhead MacDougald was one of the lawyers who drew up the petition.
So maybe he's an activist lawyer with a font fetish. So what?
Except that Buckhead MacDougald also worked with the SLF's legal challenge against the campaign finance law we now call McCain-Feingold. Went all the way to the Supreme Court, that one did, underwritten by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, and handled up the legal chain by an attorney named Kenneth Starr.
I'm remembering the name. I'm having trouble placing the face.
Within four hours of CBS broadcasting the dubious paperwork, this man was, to use the parlance of Radioactive Man, "Up and At Them!" A complete mechanical and historical breakdown of the history of the font type, the IBM Selectric typewriter, the capacity of Microsoft Windows to produce such documents, and a call to arms for all other bloggers rightly suspicious of the Killian Memos.
I wrote here not long after it all broke that since doubtful doc-u-dramas had been a part of the Presidential Campaign landscape since 1844, that it really would be a nice innovation if somebody had had the cajones to self-forge? just for the novelty of the thing. At about the same time, Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe speculated on the same possibility, and even fingered Karl Rove, who has in the past been suspected of tapping his own candidate's phone, and dropping off his own candidate's debate practice tape, to make himself and his team look like injured parties.
Buckhead's identity does nothing to confirm that bit of political science fiction.
Sadly, though, in this time when you are presumed conspiratorial until proved individualistic, the fact that somebody could, if they wanted to, draw a line from Ken Starr and Mitch McConnell through Harry "Buckhead" MacDougald to the lightning-fast doubt-raising about the Killian memos? means that a lot of somebodies will.