CPAC Wrap-Up: John Fund Edition

Julian Sanchez | February 20, 2005

When I strolled in on Saturday, early in the afternoon, the blogger corner was all abuzz about John Fund, who'd apparently just plopped himself down in front of a blogger's (briefly unattended) laptop and proceeded to check email for 20 minutes. When the owner returned, Fund reportedly informed him he'd "just be a minute" and kept right on pluggin'. Robert Cox has started a Fund fund drive to buy the reporter a Blackberry.

Some bloggers seem to think this is a tale of big media arrogance toward mere bloggers. I suspect it's just Fund's absent minded professor schtick. Folks who've known him a while report that he didn't find anything unusual about coming into the (collective) office on weekends to do laundry in the restroom sink. So I'd say chalk this one up, I think, neither to the ever-popular David & Goliath narrative of bloggers vs. MSM nor even, really, to rudeness so much as, well, let's call it an idiosyncratic sense of how people normally behave. I assume (well, hope) that it just didn't occur to him to ask whether it was a laptop set up for anyone to use—it's not clear that anyone actually told him.