And if a blogger in those days dared to criticize Congressman Paul for, say, taking money from card-carrying neo-Nazis or claiming authorship of a newsletter that talked smack about, oh, black people ("I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal") she was roundly creamed by organized commenters.
I know, because this happened to me. I'd give a link to my interrogation of the Paul scene from the waning days of 2007, but it doesn't exist. My editor at the New York Times fully expunged the record after hundreds of Paulians swarmed the site—like bacteria or antibodies—and sowed the comments section with vitriol.