In the wake of the Easterbrook controversy, both Ernie the Lawyer and Jerry Lawson have chimed in on one of the inherent risks of maintaining a weblog: leaving an easy and well-documented trail for later use against the author, not in a court of law (although that can happen) but in the no-holds-barred world of politics.  The practice of digging up old writings and speeches and using them, often in a slanted or distorted way, to discredit the speaker -- witness the current use of old pro-Bush speeches by Wesley Clark -- is a time-honored political tradition in this country.  But if I can be forgiven for using a pair of superficially conflicting metaphors, let me make an observation.  Both the internet, with its inherent stickiness (enhanced by Google and the Internet Wayback Machine), and weblogs, which like Teflon vastly promote the fluidity of ideas, have magnified the volume of the source material that is available for this purpose.

Ultimately, though, several other things are true:

• A person who has written or spoken extensively will probably have said things that a clever opponent can use against him.
• A person who seeks a political or judicial office will probably be the type of person who has written and spoken in many venues, compulsives and overachievers being what they are by nature.
• Often, such a person is precisely the type of person we want for such offices, as he has shown himself to be the type of person who thinks things through and can articulate his ideas.
• If, on the other hand, he has thought things through to ridiculous or unsupportable conclusions, there's nothing like a weblog to show it.
• Your mother never told you that politics was for the faint of heart -- or the weak of mind.

7:47:25 AM