An army of bloggers: how to turn low-budget revolutionaries into respectable members of the establishment.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, - Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, - Book review

Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, White River Function, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 216 pages, $25

An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, by Glenn Reynolds, Washington, D.C.: Nelson Current, 256 pages, $24.99

IT WAS THE middle of last February, and the bloggers had arrived with cameramen in tow. Pajamas Media, a weblog collective launched with $3.5 million of venture capital, had sent two of its stars to Arlington, Virginia, to explore some new evidence about Iraq's antebellum weapons of mass destruction. While novelist, screenwriter, and Pajamas Media co-founder Roger L. Simon chatted up former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and former CIA Director James Woolsey for video-enhanced blog posts, filmmaker Andrew Marcus visited Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.).

Hoekstra, the chairman of the Select House Intelligence Committee and a vocal supporter of the Iraq war, wanted to attach jumper cables to the debate over weapons of mass destruction. Three years had passed since weapons inspectors, following Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's directions, had failed to find deadly ordnance "in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Hoekstra's committee had a stash of declassified documents from before the war, and no one was translating them; since the WMD debate was basically over, there wasn't much interest in what Saddam's inner circle used to bluster about. But if these documents could be publicized, there would be a chance for war supporters to argue anew that the invasion was justified. Now, Hoekstra told Marcus, was the time to "unleash the power of the Net on these 55,000 boxes of documents to see exactly what went on." Bloggers could translate the documents themselves, or at least pass around information and rumors about what the papers contained. If the intelligence community wasn't interested, Hoekstra could put the papers on-line and "let the blogosphere go!"

It was an odd proposal. With cable and network news excitedly reporting on unearthed Saddam audio tapes and with the considerable power Hoekstra had in Congress, did he really need help to launch a P.R. campaign about pre-war Iraqi intelligence? Wouldn't bloggers laugh this off? Not at all: As the documents came out, Hoekstra's brainstorm was greeted with candy and flowers. Powerline blogger John Hinderaker called Hoekstra a "hero" who was making "these documents and tapes public so that the truth about Saddam's regime can be more fully known." The document dump turned out to be seriously flawed, with irrelevant conversations and translations of American news stories mixed in with papers from Saddam's regime. But when wrapping up his interview with Hoekstra, Pajamas Media's Marcus sounded downright gleeful: "So, the last chapter in the story on the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has not been written, has it?" A patriotic viewer could practically hear the A *Team theme kicking in.

The very idea of bloggers signing up for a pro-war P.R. project would have strained credulity when the medium first attracted wide public attention. In the late 1990s, easy-to-use Web...