At the time, in the spring and early summer of 2003, of course, we were failing to find any significant WMDs and Mylroie's book was a bit of a gamble that we would find those WMDs; it was also a bit of Bush propaganda. I wrote about this on AOL in the message boards under a pseudonym called Fishhawk (given the hysteria of the time, it was unwise to use real names on AOL).

About three days later, I was surprised to see my 'story' in Paul Krugman's column except that he had seen it on Talking Points Memo where a reader had passed the information on to Josh Marshall (TPM, of course, is known for its great readers and their attentiveness to good tidbits to pass on). My version was first. Some extra details were added by Marshall and Krugman but what the reader passed on to Marshall was very much what I wrote. I honestly didn't mind because I became a steady reader of Talking Points Memo and about two dozen other blogs and left the growing chaos and frustration of the AOL message boards behind.