For that, we have to turn to Newser’s Michael Wolff, a man who appears to rise from his bed each and every morning with the same goal: What’s the nastiest, ugliest, most pandering way I can generate cheap page views for my website today?

Citing zero evidence, Wolff accuses Tony Judt of faking the whole thing.

Let’s say it: Judt, who sounds in the piece like he’s having a conversation with himself — or as he might imagine himself at 16 — is. He’s made up his son’s part. How the New York Times could not have been wise to this is preposterous (figuring, no doubt, that if the parties in question were in agreement on their respective authorship, who could say otherwise)…

In this instance, pretending that the straw man — and helpful and convenient foil — is actually real makes it all the more dubious. Judt is, it turns out — like most intellectuals with a political point to make — a crafty confidence man.

In return, the Daily Beast helpfully provided a forum for young Judt (or faux Judt — who can tell in this hall of Web mirrors?) to respond. If he’s for real, he sounds like someone who is going to have to be reckoned with for decades to come.

There’s nothing I can say that will factually authenticate my portion of Sunday’s op-ed. Sure, I could pull up countless email exchanges with my dad laying out our respective parts of the piece or open documents on my computer that have only my own prose on them, but both would surely be condemned as extravagant hoaxes. In short, Mr. Wolff, I can’t get around one blockade that will prevent me from proving that I wrote my half of the article: your habit of parading your own opinions as fact, caused by your willingness to make up anything in order to get a few reads, comments, and tweets.

So young, and so percipient! Again, I am reminded of someone who regularly shares meals at my own table. But I also have to agree with a tweet from Tim Fernholz: “Daniel Judt is really punching under his weight here, he should pick on someone his own size.”

There are two Sandra Bullock stories, “Bullock Fears Murder But Will File for Divorce,” and “There’s a Sex Tape … Starring Sandra … And It’s Ultra Nasty,” mixed in with your run-of-the-mill Pope sex scandal update and latest Michael Steele imbroglio. There are the required trashy slide shows, “7 Signs LiLo Is the New Britney” and “5 Other Celebs We Hated — Temporarily” and straight-out titillation: “Maine Topless Protesters Draw Oglers.”

And much, much more. But what takes Newser beyond countless other similar sites is a truly precious degree of shamelessness. All of the above stories — even the slide shows – are repackaged, rewritten and abbreviated versions of content originated by other publications. When your pursuit of traffic leads you to the point of ripping off a Fox News Lindsay Lohan/Britney slide show, you have stooped so low you can’t even reach up to the lowest common denominator.

Newser doesn’t try to completely hide its sins. The “sources” for its rewrites get a link, in a button to the right of the story, and sometimes, more appropriately, within the story itself. But that hasn’t appeased the wrath of the operators of other Web sites who feel their content is being repurposed and appropriated in a fashion that goes far beyond what is considered acceptable in the world of Web-based journalism.

Via Felix Salmon comes the news that Sharon Waxman, founder of the entertainment news site The Wrap, has taken umbrage at Wolff and Co. She lays out her case here, and Wolff, wielding his poison pen as only he can, responds here. The gist: Waxman argues that Newser is free-riding off her content, to which Wolff responds, essentially: You use too many words, and we’re doing the world a service by cutting you down to size.

Newser is hardly the first Web site to try to gin up a lot of traffic via sleazy aggregation. But the arrogance with which Wolff tries to pretend that what his operation is doing is some kind of evolutionary step forward in the news business — “Read Less. Know More.” — deserves a special award for effrontery. On the Web, giving ample credit and linking to sources are essential steps in making this new Internet information ecosystem work for everybody. Newser obscures where the content it is appropriating comes from, adds zero editorial value, and even serves up advertisements when you try to leave the site after clicking on a link in the “source” box to see the original story!

You’d have to work hard to be more annoying. But if anyone can do it, it would be Wolff. To anyone who has followed Michael Wolff’s career, as I have, with some astonishment, from failed Internet entrepreneur to New York magazine columnist to Vanity Fair columnist to a second stint as an Internet entrepreneur, there’s nothing at all surprising about watching Newser’s canker on the Web fester in such glory. But in tribute to Newser’s business model, instead of creating a fresh new take on the wonder that is Michael Wolff’s lifelong contribution to journalism, I will simply repurpose some 12-year-old Salon content — two reviews I edited of Wolff’s 1998 tale of Internet incompetence, “Burn Rate.”

From Scott Rosenberg’s “Money for Nothing”:

It’s difficult to argue with Wolff’s conclusion that the Net industry is a con game full of posturing and lies, since he serves himself up as the damning evidence. He learns to play the game well (at one point he eludes an angry investor by pretending that his father-in-law is in the midst of open-heart surgery), but not well enough to retain control of his company or make off with the millions his banker had promised …

Throughout, Wolff poses as a savvy journalist turned naive businessperson: In the techno-crazed world of the Net, we’re to understand, he’s the Man of Words, the writer who grasps the power of language and perspective and ideas. But the stuff Wolff’s company was trying to sell during the period the book covers — from those mountains of Net guidebooks to a Web personalization service called “Your Personal Network” — hardly represented a revolutionary effort to bring the values of quality journalism to the online world. Wolff was producing hype-driven, highly perishable goods, just like the next Net huckster.

From Alexander Cohen’s “Self Combustion”:

Perhaps the most telling moment in “Burn Rate” comes a little more than halfway through the book. Michael Wolff, the aspiring Internet entrepreneur, has just succeeded in selling an essentially worthless database of information for “seven figures” to the computer magazine publishing company CMP. He and his lawyer wife, Alison, are discussing their unexpected and somewhat discombobulating coup. Wolff writes: “‘Just think,’ I said, warming to the moment, ‘how many stupid people there are in this world who we can take advantage of …’”

In “Burn Rate” the narrator doesn’t just reveal his own neuroses and personality flaws — he un-self-consciously exhibits all the naivete, foibles and amoral exhibitionism of Michael Wolff himself. Wolff’s narrative audacity is stunning. He is, by his own account, a man who seems willing to break any promise, sell out his employees and do just about anything else to further his own selfish interests.

Twelve years later, has anything changed?

UPDATE: The related link to Michael Wolff’s response isn’t working, I am informed. But it is the first comment…

Writing for Newser, Wolff says he does think the cartoon was racist, and deliberately so, and he also drops one interesting tidbit: Murdoch himself is probably “livid” over the decision to run it. With a hat-tip to Ben Smith, an excerpt from Wolff’s post:

As a student of the Post and of Murdoch and his people, let me suggest the likelihood that Allan and the Post are well off the post-modern reservation. That Allan’s personal and tabloid anger, never so carefully in check, has burst into the open in an incredible spasm of tone deafness and — say it — racism. For one thing, there is, blatantly, jaw-droppingly, without disguise or camouflage or deniability, the conflation of the new president with the mad chimpanzee, who, the day before, mauled a woman. For another, no editorial cartoon at the Post can get into the paper without Allan approving it. He saw it; he got it; he bought it; he published it.

Barack Obama has been a long-simmering issue at the Post. He offends both its tabloid conservatism (however cool and witty it may have become) and, too, its latent, unreconstructed Australian tabloid — again, say it — racism. He offends it even more because Rupert Murdoch, the Post’s owner and virtual Godhead, rather likes Obama. The more and more liberal Murdoch — indeed, he was in Australia earlier this month pressing for looser immigration rules — has stifled the Post’s reflexive contempt.

So the dam burst. Repressed for most of the past year, the id suddenly broke free. Forget the post-modern crap. This is real, old-fashioned, tabloid hate.

Murdoch, I can make an educated guess, is livid. And Col Allan is shortly on his way back to Australia.

I used to have to get sick to baby myself, and even then it could be dicey. I might have the flu, fever and aches, and yet somehow talk myself into getting up to clean the cat food crust off the placemat under the cat’s dish. And if I do get up to do it, and am lightheaded from standing, my next thought might be, a brain tumor. A cerebral bleed.

The cruise ship is always inconvenient — you have to set aside some time to do nothing, like two hours. You can’t hurry doing nothing. And since spirit isn’t about what you do — God says, Be, be, be — it works best when you’re not doing anything at all.

But you’ll get to see the sweetest thing of all, one person tenderly caring for another, even if it’s crabby, mealy-mouthed you taking care of hysterical, shirking you. You take the action, and then the insight follows: Spirit heals spirit. Nothing besides kindness and quiet can realign and contain the chaotic, wailing, whining forces that pull us apart, that weaken us.

I pretend my old couch is a lounge chair on the top deck of a ship. The heater should be on low. Being warm in air or water is like being inside a great breathing being. It buoys you up gently, like an adult you trust when you’re learning to swim, where, paradoxically, you have to rest down into the water to float.

But a couple of weeks ago, I did an astonishing thing: I got on an actual cruise — the floating kind. It was an Italian liner, with 1,500 passengers, Fellini Satyricon meals, ice swan centerpieces, Internet cafes, stops in Caribbean ports. My son, his friend Alex and I went, the guests of a group that was taking 80 sober people on a cruise. I was one of two speakers, along with my Jesuit friend Father Tom, and his wonderful buddy, Buddy Kronberg.

We boarded in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and headed toward the east Caribbean. I was a wreck. Everyone was. But I am the world’s worst traveler even under the best of circumstances. I am terrified of the impending war, and of snakes, sharks, undertows and group hugs. I am also afraid of VX gas attacks, huge amounts of food, and strangers wanting my e-mail address. I love to swim in warm seas but hate getting to them. I subscribe to the motto of travel agents Karl and Carl, “Trust no one; see nothing.”

We sailed for the first two days, surrounded by seas of kindergarten blue. I found it rather peaceful, and Buddy was great company. He is in his mid-50s, and great looking, in a unique and sort of seedy way: He has gained a lot of weight since he quit smoking, and has flyaway hair like a newborn bird’s and bright blue eyes. But the arresting thing about him is that he has two missing front teeth. He is a man of enormous intelligence and humor and has done well as a freelance computer genius. Everyone falls in love with him. For instance, Sam, who can be cool and distant these days, had a couple of meals with Buddy and then confided to me, rather mournfully, “I just love Buddy so much.”

Buddy had not been on a boat since Vietnam, so he was a little tense about several things. He was afraid that the ship would tip over, he was worried that a revolution was brewing among the cabin help. And also, that John Ashcroft was spying on the three of us — him, Tom and me — as we grimly checked the news at the Internet cafe every few hours, expressing tiny opinions on George Bush’s humanity, sobriety and deft diplomatic touch.

Buddy kept saying things like, “We need to be on the lookout for possible security breaches.” And, “We should suck up to the captain.” And, “The revolution is being led by unseen forces. In the boiler room.” I got into the spirit of things, to take my mind off Iraq, North Korea and, mostly, Sam.

Sam was hanging out until all hours at the disco, with Alex. They were in a room across the hall, and had fallen in with a pack of roving teenage reprobates, who met every night near the Internet cafe to plan the evening’s sorties. Sam is mostly sweet and funny and thinks I am hilarious, but sometimes an adolescent phantom uses Sam’s body as a host. I call the phantom “Phil.” He is full of contempt, boredom, secrets, poor judgment. Phil does not think I am funny. He thinks I am a moron. Friends who’ve had teenagers tell me to love and respect him enough to release him to the consequences of his actions, but some days go better than others. I wish I were God’s Deputy Under Secretary Of How Everything Turns Out. But instead, I’m Mrs. Afraid.

I turned to Buddy for help a few times, although he has no children. I told him how contemptuously Phil had answered my prying, invasive questions that morning, like, “What are your plans today?” Buddy said, “You could let God be in charge of surveillance. Maybe your fear makes Sam more afraid. My friend Blanche could ask her husband a question, answer it herself, and go away mad.”

I stopped by the chapel to pray a few times. It was very Italian, painted the colors of rainbow sherbet. Then I’d go to the Internet cafe to check my e-mail. I’d end up reading the news, what Michael Wolff called “the long, execrable, grinding buildup to war.” And then walk dejectedly into sunshine, where there’d be hundreds of people clothed in American flags.

They’d be wearing flag pins, caps and hats, and beach totes, flag swimsuits, flag towels. It’s like everyone went to Gift Shoppe USA before boarding. I felt very fragile. Michael Wolff was right when he said, “The slow motion is the weird, unnerving part.” So I’d try to speed things up, racewalk around the boat past all the bodies sunbathing on deck, half of them glorious, half of them — comment se dit? — less glorious. I’d go looking for Tom and Buddy.

Buddy and Tom were just as worried as I was. Buddy said that in Indonesia, tour guides take goats along with them on tour buses, to toss over cliffs to the Komodo dragons below, to amuse the tourists. The goats have to be alive, because the dragon wants to play, and it’s more fun for the tourists.

“Maybe the goat doesn’t know what awaits him,” I said.

“The goat knows,” Buddy replied. “The smell of Komodo poop, and dead goats, gets stronger.”

This is how afraid I sometimes feel now.

I talked to my pastor about my fears right before I left for this cruise. She told me about flying home from a vacation with her daughters, with the plane bucking, and people crying out. “We were petrified,” she said. “But we stuck together, and I absolutely knew that in life, as in death, we belonged to God. We were safer with God and each other on that plane than we would have been without God, on the ground.”

When she told me this, I thought, a fat lot of good that does me. But Tom said the same thing. “Sticking together is what saves us,” he said. “Praying for the willingness to have mild spiritual well-being helps — you don’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity. Me? I’m just willing to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees. And if I stay sober, help other people, and not kill anyone today that’s a lot.”

While we were at sea, I hid in my room as much as possible and read magazines. I vacillated between faith and utter hopelessness. War could break out in the next breath, and yet, so far, it felt like when Mr. Magoo is about to fall off the beams of the skyscraper, and another girder appears at his feet. I don’t know how long this can last, though. Once a government is convinced that it’s right, and everyone else is wrong, and can be excluded from the family of man, then you’re on the way to concentration camps. I never forget that Bush used the word “crusade,” so he could baptize the slaughter. But by the same token, I also never forget that there is one who has all power, and it’s not Bush. Then I’d go look for Buddy or Tom.

Buddy and Tom were never in the sun. We are all fair, and my father died of melanoma. My heart leapt whenever I found raggedy old Buddy. One morning, I found him by the fancy glass elevators in the center of the ship. People were getting out, or waiting to board. Buddy stared into the emptied elevator and clutched his head. The handrail had pulled free. Screws stuck out everywhere. When he saw me, he said, “What if the hull is like this.” He covered his mouth. “I shouldn’t say this in a crowd,” he whispered.

It was easy to identify with him, and see how beautiful he is, even with the missing teeth, but I was having trouble identifying with most of the other people onboard. It was partly all those fucking flags, partly how boorish the Americans could be after a few drinks. Tom said salvation is when you identify with people, but I didn’t identify with these flag people.

I was on the top walkway of the ship one morning. I stopped, and began to watch the people below bathing in the sun. I stood at the railing, outside the Internet cafe, and I looked at the old bodies, and the hideously perfect young bodies. Even from 15 feet up, at the rail, I could see the corrugated skin, the lumps and veins and chicken-skin knees. I saw huge guts, bad moles, flag towels, and flag beach totes, and fat, hairy middle-aged men wearing teeny bikinis. One old woman seemed to be wearing oversize pink-tinted pantyhose, which turned out to be her skin; and everything in me wanted to run for my room or the Internet. But then I had the simplest, cloth-coat spiritual awakening. That’s all it took. A spiritual awakening almost never means that the world suddenly makes sense; it just means you stop, and remember something, that usually makes you want to do something kind — call your parents, tolerate your children, or, in this case, to care for my sad, fretful self. And with blinding intuition, I knew I needed to be on a cruise ship.

I went down the stairs to the deck where people lay sunbathing. I found a lounge chair in the warm shade and stretched out. It was so unnatural for me. I must have looked tense and ridiculous, like Richard Nixon at Club Med. I looked at everyone, and thought, If Jesus was right, then these are my motley siblings. And they are so letting themselves go. I know this is not how Jesus would have seen things, but I saw an expanse of walruses, big wet bodies flopped down on towels, letting it all hang out.

It’s the opposite of hibernation, resting in the sun. The people were putting cool lotion on their bodies, and on one another: They got up and returned with drinks for the people they were with. They handed each other caps and visors, and covered each other up with towels and T-shirts.

Surely they all knew what was going on, that we were about to go to war, but — or so — they lay there anyway. They chatted, or dozed, in the warmth of the sun. I thought of people warming themselves around the campfire on a battlefield. I know God doesn’t see their walrus bodies; God sees their hearts at temporary ease. God sees babies, radiant, befuddled babies, and after a few minutes I could see how safe they were, just in that moment, because the warmth held them up like the sea.

Then columnist Holman Jenkins expressed doubt that the deal would even hold together — and if it does, that it represents “the last crazy Internet valuation” and a pop to the “Internet bubble.”

Then Red Herring editor Anthony Perkins applauded the merger and declared AOL boss Steve Case to be “a strategic genius with a capital G” for trading in his company’s inflated stock for the more tangible assets of Time Warner.

Then author Michael Lewis declared there were “no good reasons” for AOL to buy Time Warner — and that in a decade the whole “obscenely large” conglomerate would be broken up into its component corporate atoms.

It’s good to see the experts have such a handle on these important stories.

Whether the deal is a Good Thing depends, of course, on your definition of good, which depends on where you sit. The financial press spilled gallons of ink assessing who outsmarted whom in the merger chess game. If, like me, you own no stock in either company, that won’t hold your attention for long.

From a different direction, the media critics came out in force to make the obvious and irrefutable point that the merger would further concentrate the ownership of media in a small number of corporate hands. But they had trouble nailing down exactly how the deal would hurt public access to news and information.

Neither the horse-race handicappers nor the media-monopoly hand wringers focused on the issue that matters most to Internet users like me, and those of my readers who’ve corresponded with me this week. They and I still harbor hope for the Internet as a new medium with an unprecedented openness, diversity of voices and populist power — a global Speaker’s Corner that gives millions of individuals the chance to reach millions of other individuals and to choose their sources of information from a vast newsstand.

This openness is a direct result of the way the Internet and its underlying protocols were designed over the past three decades by engineers and computer scientists who wanted to enable communication in new ways. The technical choices that guarantee this openness at the heart of the Net’s technology — decentralized packet routing, an emphasis on transparency over security, a “many-to-many” rather than “one-to-many” architecture — are the very same factors that tend to trip up big corporations that wish to bend the Net to traditional marketing ends or use it to replicate the old-fashioned relationships of broadcast media.

Over the past decade, the geeks and the marketroids have struggled for the soul of the online world — and so far, the geeks have won. The Internet itself is their baby, and it has triumphed over all the also-ran closed networks that dismissed it as “too complicated” and “too scary” for the average Joe. But the marketroids have roared back over the past five years in an effort to bend the Net into a compliant shape.

The only question that really matters this week in the wake of the AOL-Time Warner deal is whether it can tip the balance in this continuing tug of war.

With AOL’s free-disk carpet-bombers now on the same team as Time Warner’s book- and music-club promoters, the new corporate colossus is the ultimate marketroid machine. Others have failed to fence in the Net; can it succeed?

Or, as some of my e-mail correspondents put it, as long as we can still go where we want and do what we want on the Net, why should we care what AOL-Time Warner does?

For starters, let’s be clear that both AOL and Time Warner would eagerly secede from the broader Net if they could figure out how. At the Monday press conference announcing the merger, executives repeatedly pointed out the common ground between AOL and Time Warner: Both run subscription-based businesses. What they didn’t add is that both companies’ cultures share a closed-access mind-set.

Cable providers like Time Warner are legal monopolies in the communities they serve. And we should never forget that AOL, though it has spent much of the past year on a campaign for its own “open access” to cable providers, has spent most of its history as a closed-door online service. It opened itself to the Web and Internet only when doing so became a matter of survival in the mid 1990s, as it became clear that the Internet’s vast commons would kill off the proprietary services. To this day, AOL maintains acre upon virtual acre of its clunky, closed-door proprietary pages.

Today’s Net consumers have evolved a stubborn mind-set toward those who would exact toll-like subscriptions from them. People expect to pay someone for Internet access — for the general “pipe.” Then they expect to be able to pick and choose from an array of content and services that are supported by advertising. They paid once at the ISP office; why should they pay again?

Outside of the porn world, only a tiny handful of Web sites are able to charge for access — like the Wall Street Journal Online, which I suspect most subscribers are writing off as a business expense, and much of whose content is now available for free on MSNBC. Sites that once waved the “subscriptions are the future” banner, like Slate and TheStreet.com, have retrenched in an ad-supported mode.

I’m guessing that the executives in AOL Time Warner’s boardrooms are hard at work trying to reverse this trend. Let’s listen in on how their strategy session might go:

“How can we monetize our content assets in the broadband future?” (Yes, they do talk that way.)

“People pay to rent videos,” says the guy with the black marker, scrawling his bullet points on the board. “Surely, in the broadband future, they’ll pay for movies-on-demand and music-on-demand and, if we play our cards well, news- and information-on-demand.”

“But if we put this stuff out there digitally it’ll get pirated. It’ll lose value. People will pay once to download and then copy the files, share them with friends.”

“Our mass-market customers are scared of hackers and security risks and privacy invasions, anyway, and they just hate dealing with their screwy computers. What if we re-architect the Net and build a new kind of network for them — one that’s safe for them and us? We’ll control the back-end technology so we can make everything easy and convenient, which is what AOL’s known for, and also make it safe for our copyrights. We’ll be the service provider and the content provider. We’ll throw in Internet e-mail, of course; people want that. But the rest will be ours. It’ll run on dedicated appliances — no more crashing PCs to worry about. We’ll offer all the great proprietary stuff we already run, like chat and buddy lists, of course. Then we’ll give ‘em all our brand names in a variety of monthly packages, just like we do with our cable TV properties, at a bunch of different premiums. No more mucking around with the messy Web — you’ll get all quality content all the time, kid-filtered and neatly organized. And we’ll know who the customers are and what their credit card numbers are. They can pay for their monthly service and their e-commerce charges on the same bill.”

“I love it! What do we call it?”

“‘Full Service Network’ has a nice ring.”

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That, of course, was the name of Time Warner’s ill-fated interactive TV experiment in Orlando, Fla., in the early ’90s. Almost certainly, the new AOL-Time Warner is itching to revive some version of it — whether along the lines of my nightmare above or in some other form.

Will the public go for such a scheme? One big reason the Orlando effort flopped was that it cost Time Warner far too much per household. Smart pricing would be essential for any new-millennium effort to revive the consumer-friendly, fee-based interactive TV idea. Still, AOL understands smart pricing, and the stock market today may well be willing to underwrite the cost of building such a network, which seemed prohibitive a decade ago.

What will really make or break any such plan is how receptive customers are to an online corporate theme park (Bob Pittman, the AOL exec who will be calling a lot of shots in the new conglomerate, once ran an amusement-park chain). If enough millions of people opted for that kind of service, we could witness a kind of commercial Balkanization of the online world. Such a return to the pre-Internet days of proprietary services and closed gates could send today’s Internet shrinking back to where it began the ’90s — as a fringe community of scholars and smart kids.

It may all come down to which is stronger: the public’s appetite for convenience and a mall-like experience online, or its hunger for the kind of unpredigested hurly-burly today’s Internet still provides.

I can’t predict that outcome. I wouldn’t want to underestimate the spunk and intelligence of the millions of Internet users who in a few short years have turned the network into an astonishingly rich pool of human knowledge and interaction. But I don’t want to underestimate the persuasive powers of the world’s largest media corporation, either.

I do know one thing: AOL-Time Warner’s interests are now aligned opposite those of a freewheeling, independent Internet. So let’s give ‘em hell — while we still can.