DEMABLOG: the AP and crowing lefty bloggers will treat this as total vindication. That’s how the game is played: dumb it down to something simple like “Does Jamil Hussein exist?” and ignore the other issues.Horace Walpole managed to coin the word serendipity without apparently breaking sweat. I’ve been scratching my head looking for a word to describe the rabble-rousers of the blogosphere and nothing has quite worked. Rabble-rouser is too pejorative online – after all, you and I might be the rabble. Ranters and ravers doesn’t cut it. Demagogue to demablogue doesn’t look right on the page. But stripped down it becomes the blunter demablog. I know it might sound like a demablog is a Democrat, but I’m going with that – demablog it is, and this is why I need it – the Jamil Hussein story.

The campaign by demablogs like Flopping Aces and Michelle Malkin against the Associated Press seems to be at an end. Back in early December, when I blogged the story, I suggested the demabloggers (I wasn’t calling them that then) take a trip to Baghdad. A week or so later, ex-CNN exec, Eason Jordan, offered to make that happen.

In case you’re not familiar with the saga, here’s a precis from the CJR which analyses the reaction to an AP story from November, 2006:

…that Shiite militiamen in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah had “grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.”

Almost immediately, conservative bloggers like Flopping Aces and Michelle Malkin started questioning the existence of the story’s source, an Iraqi policeman named Captain Jamil Hussein. The U.S.-led force in Iraq then got on the case, denied the incident happened, and demanded a response from the AP. But the wire service issued a statement, saying that “The attempt to question the existence of the known police officer who spoke to the AP is frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.”

The AP followed up on Wednesday with an article that rolled out multiple sources in the Baghdad neighborhood where it supposedly took place, offering further witness to the events. The story continued to percolate over the weekend and looks to continue on to this week, with the New York Times‘ Tom Zeller weighing in this morning, reprinting an email from Baghdad reporter Ed Wong, who said that “We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here…Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident.”

…the bloggers and the U.S. Army, who reflexively denied the initial account, did so not because they were concerned with accuracy. They picked on it because they saw a chance to use a potentially false story – though it seems clear now that it might be true after all – as a way of throwing into question all the reporting from Iraq and, more specifically, undermining the characterization of the situation in the country as abysmal.

Now, reports the AP, a Jamil Hussein faces arrest for talking to the media. Yes, the games demablogs play end with human beings.

Let’s hope Malkin and Ace Flopper still get their Iraq trip – although it’s the road to Baghdad, rather than Damascus that they’ll likely be taking.