Blog P.I.

Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic, Slate and most recently the Los Angeles Times editorial page, pens a whopper of a blind item in his latest column, for the Washington Post and Slate:

The first person I knew who had a Web site of his own was a fellow Washington journalist. This was when many journalists were still just getting into e-mail, but the URL for this Web site quickly circulated around town and around the world. Why? Well, we were all impressed by the technological savvy. But we were absolutely astounded by the solipsism. What on earth had gotten into Joe (not his real name)? This was a modest, soft-spoken, and self-effacing fellow, yet his Web site portrayed him as an egotistical monster.

The list of possibles is vanishingly small. There’s Kinsley’s fellow former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan… maybe fellow neoliberal contrarian Mickey Kaus, and… there’s Andrew Sullivan. Kinsley offers a few more clues:

Or so it seemed at the time. All of the elements that struck us as obnoxious maybe eight years ago no longer seem that way. In fact, they are now virtually required for any writer’s Web site. The Web address, of course, was his name: JoeJournalist.com. It’s hard to recapture why that even seemed pretentious. But it did. Then there was his deadpan list of books he’d written and awards he’d won. And quotes from other journalists about how wonderful he is. It all seemed totally out of character, and terribly immodest. Poor Joe! Had the World Wide Web driven him crazy?

All right. Is there seriously anyone left who doesn’t think this is Andrew Sullivan?

Update: Mickey Kaus says it’s neither, citing Sullivan as an unlikely to have possessed the virtues Kinsley ascribed to this Washington journalist pre-AndrewSull… er, JoeJournalist.com. Now, I don’t know Sullivan personally, but at least on television — debating on “The Chris Matthews Show” or those old C-SPAN mornings with Brian Lamb and Christopher Hitchens — he is all of those things. Perhaps Kinsley was simply being generous, and besides had a column to write.

Updated again: This blog post is mentioned briefly in the latest episode of Bloggingheads. As the comments here indicate, Kaus strongly implies to Robert Wright that Kinsley’s subject was James Fallows. Meanwhile, Gawker thinks it’s Malcolm Gladwell.

I can’t add much more here. I don’t know the parties involved, and while I don’t think there’s enough content at the early Fallows site to convey anything like solipsism or egomania, I suppose I will defer to Kaus’ certainty.