That's what Newsmax.com says:

....the Secret Service was notified when a blogger posted a rant on one of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign Web sites calling for Clinton's death.

I'd like to know how we know that whoever posted this was a blogger? Does he have a blog?

Or are we supposed to take Newsmax.com at its word?

Perhaps we're supposed to take the New York Post at its word, for they have echoed the same charge against a "blogger."

February 12, 2007 -- A blogger's rant calling for Hillary Rodham Clinton's death - and posted on one of Sen. Barack Obama's campaign Web sites yesterday - came as her security has been being dramatically beefed up, The Post has learned.

[...]

The sick note, which misspelled Obama's first name as "Barrack," also blasted the Illinois senator, saying he's a "politician who hasn't had experience wrestling in filth with the great whores in Washington."

The anonymous note came as new details emerged about the former first lady's U.S. Secret Service detail - which has received a major boost since the New York senator declared her bid for the White House on Jan. 20.

The increase - from three or four federal agents to as many as a dozen - took place in recent weeks, before the Web posting.

Asked about the posting, Clinton aides said it was forwarded to the Secret Service, but they wouldn't comment further.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, "This is obviously a horrible abuse of the openness of our Web site. We took it down because the content was deplorable and has no place in the discussion."

Unless someone has some evidence that it was posted by a blogger, I think it borders on being a smear against blogging.

Ignorance by Newsmax I can see, but the Post ought to know better than to confuse commenters (much less anonymous commenters) with bloggers.

Coupled with the news of Amanda Marcotte's resignation, this makes me wonder whether I might have been onto something when I speculated about whether there's a movement to discredit bloggers.

(I'll have to think about Franklin's hang together or hang separately stuff.)

UPDATE: ABC knows better than to call an anonymous commenter a "blogger," but they still title the threat a "Blog Rant."

Is it necessary to even point out that anyone -- anyone -- could have posted that comment? I think it's disingenous to call it a "blog rant." If someone posted a comment like that here I'd delete it as soon as I saw it, but to call it a comment "blog rant" would be laughable if people weren't taking it so seriously.

MORE: Chris Bowers (with whom I nearly always disagree) says something I think may be relevant here:

By speaking directly to the members of the electorate who are the most politically active and intense consumers of news, we can wield a lot of influence while simultaneously not playing the idiotic games of "gotcha" and faux outrage that have been used to try and sway low-information voters for the past several decades (no wonder low-information voters are dismissive of politics, considering how stupid people often assume they are). In essence, we focus on the middle tier of influence in American politics--the several million political activists--rather than just focusing on how the few thousand elites in the top tier are portrayed to the tens of millions of low information voters in the bottom tier. It is a type of triangle that explains the reach of blog power just as Peter Daou's triangle explained its limits. I can see how established consultants who are used to bypassing the middle tier altogether would want to fire junior staffers out of fear that it will result in backlash from the bottom tier. I can also see how many long time residents of the elite tier would view something as influential as the netroots as potentially vulnerable to attacks in the same way that actual members of the elite tier are vulnerable. After all, if you ignore the middle tier for so long, you might forget how it operates. The truth is that we are a different entity entirely, as our numbers and our activism allow us to boast influence without the baggage of name recognition.

How sweet it is. Being both powerful and anonymous is a beautiful thing.

If the rightie bloggers can be counted on to go after the leftie bloggers (and vice-versa), it makes the job easier.