The facts of the matter, as well as the views of Horowitz, his friends and his supporters, are only a click or two away and need not be rehearsed again here in full. The short version is that an African-American writer named Jack E. White, after reading a typically hyperbolic Horowitz column about blacks and guns, was sufficiently offended to accuse its author of racism in his own Time column.

Unlike most people criticized in newsmagazines, White’s target was not exactly defenseless. In possession of a tax-exempt foundation, a mailing list, a Web site — as well as instant access to the pages of Salon News — Horowitz scrambled the jets to mount a loud protest to the editors of Time.

White’s screed, he suggested, was just the latest episode in two decades of leftist calumny designed to disable an effective spokesman for the right (namely, him). In his mind, at least, those words in Time possessed an almost occult power to injure him and his family; indeed, he claimed to fear a possible threat to his life as a result of their publication.

Thundering to his rescue came Camille Paglia, innumerable devotees of the Horowitz oeuvre and Salon editor in chief David Talbot, not to mention the tinhorn troops of the Free Republic and assorted other conservative redoubts, and, neither last nor least, the estimable Matt Drudge.

The Aug. 25 headline on the Drudge Report proclaimed, “SALON.COM COLUMNIST PLANS $50 MILLION LAWSUIT AGAINST TIME MAG: Horowitz says [he] is planning to launch a $50 million lawsuit against Time magazine for defamation of character!”

Up to that moment, almost anyone might have felt a twinge of sympathy for Horowitz (though it would be difficult to muster the degree of pity he habitually seems to feel for himself).

According to his plaintive letter to Time editor Walter Isaacson, he is simply a well-meaning conservative with a lifelong record of support for civil rights, who was suddenly and viciously mugged in a mass-circulation magazine. He has plenty of African-American friends, including his own daughter-in-law; why, he even raises money for little homeless children, many of whom are undoubtedly black!

While there is certainly some truth in Horowitz’s anodyne portrait of himself, it is hardly a complete picture. By my standards he probably isn’t a racist, despite his provocative claim that racial oppression is “mythology.” By other people’s standards, that remark alone would qualify him for a white hood.

But even if Jack White’s charge of bigotry was grossly unfair, does that mean he and Time should be held liable for a columnist’s opinion in a court of law? Is mere name-calling a valid cause of legal action in the freewheeling home of the First Amendment?

If such were the low standard for libel, the blustering Horowitz would have been bankrupted by jury verdicts long ago. Week after week, he rarely refrains from blasting his political opponents with the harshest possible epithets.

People with whom he disagrees about the V-chip are “book burners.“

People who dislike Charlton Heston’s promotion of guns are “compulsively bigoted … little liberal Lenins.“

The president is suspected of “treason.” The president’s aides are guilty of “McCarthyism.”

And so he fumes on and on and on, in an agitprop imitation of Tourette’s syndrome.

The Horowitz column that so angered Jack White included references to Al Sharpton as a “racist bloviator” and “destructive racial demagogue,” and went on to decry “racial ambulance-chasing” by Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume.

“Unfortunately,” he wrote, “they have made their successes off the backs of the truly afflicted and disadvantaged African-Americans their demagoguery leaves behind.”

Sharpton, Jackson or Mfume may well irritate Horowitz, but his notion that they are racists living high off the suffering of their community is a rather controversial opinion, not a statement of fact. He presumes to call other people racists and then wants to sue anyone who says the same thing about him.

No matter how intemperate or offensive his opinions may be, Horowitz has every right to express them, of course, especially in Salon News. He is, however, a laboratory specimen of what Nat Hentoff was writing about when he published a book several years ago titled “Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee.” He is what we used to call, in the neighborhood where I grew up, somebody who can dish it out but can’t take it.

For the more conscientious and less partisan of Horowitz’s sympathizers, that Drudge Report headline about his intention to sue Time should have provided a nudge to memory and a hint about their hero’s hypocrisy. They might recall that it was he, in his preferred guise as defender of free expression, who became the chief fund-raiser and provider of legal counsel to Drudge in the famed libel case brought by presidential assistant Sidney Blumenthal (who is, you should know, also my longtime friend).

Unlike Horowitz vs. Time, Blumenthal vs. Drudge revolved around a matter of fact, not opinion: Had Blumenthal beaten his wife, as certain nameless Republican creeps told Drudge, or had he not? When Drudge ascertained that there were no “court records” to uphold that terrible lie, he published a retraction, which didn’t, however, necessarily protect him from a libel claim.

What Blumenthal and his family demanded was that Drudge reveal who had fed him this politically motivated slander. By exposing those liars, Drudge probably could have ended the lawsuit before it began. But the Internet gossip, who proclaimed his disdain for all journalistic constraints, pleaded that he couldn’t “reveal his sources,” even though they had misled him with a very bad story.

Honorable people surely may differ about whether Blumenthal vs. Drudge is an assault on the First Amendment or a vindication of journalistic standards. But it is hard to see how Horowitz can square his unstinting support for Drudge with his own threat to sue Time. He now wants to force Time to clear his name, but has mocked Blumenthal for seeking the same redress from Drudge.

Back then, in a letter to someone who had criticized him for supporting Drudge, Horowitz explained that he regarded the White House aide’s lawsuit as an overreaction to the ordinary fortunes of political warfare. “Certainly no one in politics is immunized from name-calling, gross misrepresentation and unfounded accusation,” he wrote to one of Blumenthal’s furious friends. “That is deplorable but it is also the territory, and has been for a long time. In such an environment, all anyone can ask is to be able to respond to the slanders that are made and correct them.”

That is precisely what Time instantly offered to Horowitz — and the magazine already has linked its Web version of Jack White’s column to Horowitz’s response in Salon News. So perhaps he should heed his own advice to Blumenthal and desist from launching a lawsuit against Time.

Maybe he should also try a little rhetorical restraint next time before he threatens to sue anyone for calling him nasty names. Dish it out, David, by all means, but remember — you have to take it, too.

For the past year, Drudge has provided the Washington Times with, on average, 46 percent of its monthly traffic. In November of 2011, the Drudge Report sent 4.7 million visitors to the Washington Times website, or 57 percent of all the Times’ traffic that month. By comparison, just 820,000 visitors actually accessed the Times through its homepage that November. (These numbers come from the Times’ internal Google Analytics statistics, which Salon obtained.)

The Drudge Report’s interest in the Washington Times is relatively recent. In November 2010, for example, it sent just 1.5 million readers to the paper’s website, less than a third of the readers it sent one year later. The Drudge Report began linking to the Washington Times with greater frequency in March 2011 — the same month, it so happens, that the Times hired a Drudge Report editor to write a weekly column for the paper.

Joseph Curl, a veteran political journalist and longtime friend of Drudge who had worked for the Drudge Report as an editor since May 2010, joined the Times that month. Curl’s first column coincided with a 30-person hiring spree. And in May 2011 — the last time Drudge referrals to the Times dipped below two million — it became clear that Drudge was employing another Washington Times hire from March 2011, Charlie Hurt, who had quietly left his job as the New York Post’s Washington bureau chief several months earlier. Hurt’s first Times op-ed ran the same week as Curl’s.

Both Curl and Hurt still work for Drudge, though you wouldn’t know it from their Washington Times columnist bios, which do not mention their other work. The jump in Drudge Report links to the Washington Times coincides perfectly with their hires. From April 1, 2011, through March 31, 2012, Drudge referred 39.4 million readers to the Washington Times’ website. In that same period, one year earlier, he referred less than half as many readers, just 19.6 million.

Are Hurt and Curl channeling traffic from one employer to another? And could the Times have hired Hurt and Curl with the expectation that the site would benefit from their jobs at Drudge? Hurt, Curl and Drudge, along with the Washington Times president, Tom McDevitt, all declined to comment. However, as editors at the Drudge Report, a famously small and close-knit shop, it seems unlikely that they are unaware of — or unconnected to — the sudden boom in Washington Times links. Both men have also personally benefited from their dual employment, as the Drudge Report has given their Washington Times’ columns coveted spots on the website’s blogroll. (Such a black box is the Drudge Report editorial apparatus that Curl and Hurt declined to comment on what their specific roles are at Drudge or whether, in fact, they even worked there still. A Washington Times insider says that both, however, continue to work for Drudge.)

Drudge is famous, of course, for his power in conservative circles. He is credited with helping put Mitt Romney over the top in the Republican primary, even coming under attack from Rick Santorum. Like Romney, the Washington Times can also credit much of a recent turnaround to Drudge. While the paper survives, as always, on the largesse of the Moon family, Drudge has helped the paper’s website restore traffic to the levels it enjoyed in the mid-2000s, before the economy and Moon family squabbles gutted the paper and its website. The man who became famous for nearly toppling a president now appears to be using his influence to prop up a right-wing paper.

Before Breitbart mainstreamed conservative obsessions, he got a graduate-level course in how the MSM worked. Mickey Kaus, in his idealized obituary of Breitbart, tells the story that illuminates the power Breitbart had as the co-editor of the Drudge Report: Breitbart, working on a tip from Kaus, told the Smoking Gun to track down an old interview in which then-gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger bragged about participating in orgies. He publicized the result at Drudge, and it instantly became national news. Work at the Drudge Report was rarely quite so entrepreneurial — usually news outlets would do the work on their own and beg for a link.

The end result of a media environment so fixated on the predilections of this one oddball and his hyperactive aide-de-camp was the rise of Drudge-baiting — the pursuit and promotion of stories designed solely to attract the interest of the Drudge Report. This often involved freak weather and news about Madonna, but it mostly meant things that made Democrats look bad. (The Schwarzanegger story, chosen in part to illustrate Breitbart’s essential fairness, qualified because it had just enough celebrity and sex to make up for the fact that it was damaging to a Republican.)

The sensibility was Drudge’s, but Breitbart was the guy people in the press desperately befriended at parties. The new gold standard of long-form campaign reporting is Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s “Game Change,” a book that tackles a presidential campaign as a series of hopefully Drudge-worthy nuggets of inane gossip. (Halperin’s previous book was essentially an ode to Drudge’s influence and import.)

The apotheosis of Drudge-bait is Politico, a site that aimed to take the national politics section of a newspaper and strip it of everything but Drudge-bait. Some days half its content seems to be relatively fact-free stories proposing or reinforcing Drudge-friendly narratives (Obama is angry and uses teleprompters, some say).

And there is the one-time “liberal Drudge,” the Huffington Post, which now has consumed the content portion of AOL itself. Breitbart was a co-founder of the site, and though he wasn’t there long, he made his mark. He loved the “celebrities blogging” gimmick that much of the early HuffPo was based around. This remains HuffPo’s most mockable and often detestable feature. (One other idea he might’ve brought to the table: hosting slightly rewritten newspaper and wire copy on the site itself, instead of linking out, as Drudge did, to Breitbart’s consternation.)

“Aggregators” like Drudge and HuffPo have mostly given way to partisan sites that specialize in the actual creation of content. Much of this content is designed as (unpaid) work-for-hire for larger news outlets — be it Fox & Friends or MSNBC — and Breitbart’s “Big” sites helpfully designed and packaged ready-made pseudo-scandals for Fox and others to fixate on.

A fixation of the online conservative movement is “scalp-hunting”: the elevation and demonization of some usually obscure liberal figure done in the hopes of getting them nationally shamed and fired. (Righties sort of do this as “retribution” for what happened to various conservatives who got in trouble and whose trouble was reported in the press, like Oliver North or Scooter Libby.) This is what the Shirley Sherrod video was supposed to be — a routine Van Jones’ing — and what it briefly was until it blew up in Breitbart’s face. It can be done with dead people, like Saul Alinsky, and organizations, like the New Black Panther Party, though the firing of still-living individuals is the primary means by which the conservative press “keeps score,” so it’s best to narrow your focus.

The Sherrod video was also an example of the limits of another of Breitbart’s gifts to modern media: the false “proof.” It is a sad fact of online publishing that some ridiculous portion of readers only read the headlines and look at the pictures before moving on. (The percentage of online commenters who do this is approximately 90 percent, according to studies I have skimmed and had strong opinions about.) Breitbart’s sites exploit this: “OBAMA MARCHES WITH NEW BLACK PANTHERS,” or something like that, goes the headline. The story can’t support the claim. It doesn’t matter. The headline means it’s true for the majority of the readership.

Shirley Sherrod’s anti-white racism became a “fact” that led to her firing because of that convention of online muckraking. The headline said she was racist and there was a YouTube video attached that probably proved it, if anyone bothered to hit play and listen.

This is how right-wing myths are created and sustained — did you hear that Oprah banned Sarah Palin from her show and Michelle Obama spent $30,000 on lingerie? Those are both lies, but they were also both Drudge headlines! — and in a media environment where, thanks to the work of activist/publishers like Breitbart, most previously agreed-upon facts are regularly up for debate anew, introducing new myths can be full-time work.

And in his war on the “mainstream press,” Breitbart played on a long-standing paranoia that Drudge’s rise also depended on: a fear that all the “liberal bias” claims were in fact true, and that what seemed to be nutty, conspiratorial nonsense emanating from the right-wing fringe media was actually the next hot story.

(Breitbart used the standards of traditional “objective” journalism as a weapon, and it often helped his cause that he was simply too exhausting to argue with, unless you were particularly pigheaded.)

The most modern thing about Breitbart was that he was so ridiculous, and so extreme, and yet taken more or less completely seriously by the mainstream press he claimed to despise. (This is in part because he was fun at parties.) Screaming — literally, screaming — vulgar, stream-of-consciousness insults on national television used to be your ticket out of respectability with the news crowd, but now it is basically indulged.

Honestly, if he helped make false civility less of a requirement for being “taken seriously” in the media world, that is almost certainly a good thing. The rest of his influence is too tied up in the influence of the Internet itself on the world of information for him to be directly blamed, but he was the raging, filter-less, irresponsible, vitriol-spewing, tireless avatar of the new way of doing things.

Here’s Matt Drudge’s headline (which was, for hours, just below the huge Murdoch story on top of the page): “Obama donor arrested as ‘Pakistani agent’…”

Free Republic used the same headline, along with “Pakistani accused of masking contributions to US politicians.”

Leaving aside the fact that “Pakistani agent” sounds more like “spy” than “unregistered foreign lobbyist,” it’s true that Syed Ghulam Fai gave $250 to Barack Obama, making him an “Obama donor.” He’s also given $6,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and at least $10,000 to Representative Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana.

And it looks like the ISI bought itself a very good friend!

Burton has been very active on the Kashmir issue. Shortly before receiving a donation from both Fai and Ahmad, Burton announced the formation of a Kashmir caucus in the U.S. Congress. He has traveled to Kashmir for events sponsored by Fai’s Kashmir Center and has spoken in favor of resolve the standoff between Pakistan and India over the territory in Pakistan’s favor.

It’s obviously a complex story, and we won’t know all the details for some time, but Matt Drudge does have the important keywords: PAKISTAN AGENT OBAMA ARREST. (And here’s the Fox Nation story! OBAMA PAKISTAN ARREST AGENT. Just get those keywords out there, no one will read beyond the headline.)

After everyone else began calling the story dumb and pointless and inane, the Post… ran a poll. Now the people can decide if Michelle Obama is “a hypocrite” for eating a hamburger! In order to justify the newsworthiness of “Michelle Obama eating a hamburger,” the Post’s Tim Carman Googled “Michelle Obama” and “hamburgers,” and discovered that she has eaten at least five hamburgers in the past.

Type in “Michelle Obama and salads” into Google, and you gets tons of hits about her introducing salad bars into schools. But few hits of her ordering salads in public.

It’s not actually an example of hypocrisy for someone who advocates a healthy lifestyle to eat a hamburger. And a shake. If you eat a balanced diet and get some exercise, a hamburger and shake every now and then is fine. Any educated adult understands this. The Washington Post understands this. But because the conservative movement has decided that the first lady’s anti-childhood obesity campaign is actually an attempt to ban all delicious food in order to force-feed your child organic arugula, this was presented in the original item as a “gotcha.” Michelle Obama says kids shouldn’t eat garbage all day, every day, but she ate a meal that has a bunch of calories! What a “mixed message.” She should eat only carrots in public, or else children will think it is OK to have a bowl of “Tacos After Midnight” Doritos for breakfast and then play Xbox games for 18 hours straight. (Plus, Jesus, people, this is Shake Shack we’re talking about — the vegetables are all fresh and organic and the cow was fed better than kids on school lunch programs.)

The Post probably just ran the stupid story to begin with because they know Obama’s anti-childhood obesity campaign is catnip for the right wing. Matt Drudge is obsessed with Michelle Obama and his weird fantasy idea of her as a threatening, angry, anti-white black woman (who is also a liberal nanny-state tyrant). Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” quickly picked it up.

Fox Nation, too, jumped on the story. Their comments section is a mostly unfiltered (the most blatantly racist comments, of which there are plenty, are eventually flagged and removed) peek into the hatred and resentment that feeds Michelle Obama stories on the right-wing Web:

What’s especially insane about this is that Michelle Obama has worked very hard to not give people any reason at all to hate her. She made one ill-advised statement on the campaign trail — the misinterpreted bit about being proud of her country for the “first time” in her “adult life” — but since then she has been precisely as “controversial” a first lady as Laura Bush. She entertains. She travels. She wears nice clothes. Her sole policy issue is healthy children.

She’s a well-educated, successful woman from a blue-collar background who took a break from her successful career to basically raise their adorable children while her husband is president. She is not “threatening” like Hillary Clinton, who actually wanted to be president herself. Or, at least, she’s not “threatening” unless you’re just “threatened” by… successful, powerful, black women. (I’m sorry, I meant to say “uppity.”)

The clue that this is not related at all to anything Michelle Obama has actually done (or said), but rather who she is, is the legend of the old “Whitey” tape, which various right-wingers promised to produce, and which I, for one, still cannot wait to hear.

Sure, the right-wing Internet nuts and their enablers at every industry-funded think tank in Washington would turn a “kids should exercise” program into a full-on assault on liberty under any Democratic president — it’s what they do! — but the tone of the Michelle Obama coverage, and the commentary it generates, is pretty unmistakably racially tinged. (In addition, obviously, to being usually blatantly sexist.)

But as long as the Post continues policing Michelle Obama’s public appearances for imaginary hypocrisies, and then conducting polls about them, it can either absolve itself of responsibility or congratulate itself for the fuss it kicked up.

“Drudge Report currently resembles CofCC.org,” goes the headline.. (Heads up: link goes to neo-confederate white supremacist site!) “The extremely popular news aggregate Drudge Report appears to be the only major news outlet bringing up the astronomical amount of black crime taking place.” And then there is the link to Drudge’s list of all the “melees” and “chaos” that happened during a holiday weekend when lots of drunk revelers across the nation sometimes get rowdy (and are sometimes shot dead, by police officers).

So: Nice new friends you have made, Matt.

You know how every so often the lamestream media publishes or airs a bunch of stories about how influential and important Matt Drudge is? And it’s proper “news” when he hires right-wing journalists to help him “cover” the elections or even when he simply promotes a friend’s book? How come no one besides a couple commie liberal bloggers has actually said anything about Matt Drudge’s impossible-to-ignore habit of blatant, shameless race-baiting, exactly?