Matt Yglesias seems to take some great amusement in the idea of conservatives following how liberal foundations work, since what’s been discovered was “previously, widely-known, universally-acknowledged, and denied by nobody.”

Well, I don’t know how directly this is aimed at me — though I’m named in the post — but what I uncovered about Pew and the wider liberal-foundation effort to pass campaign-finance reform hardly fits the description Yglesias provides. I don’t see any need to recount the facts of the Pew case, but there were two distinct, and contradictory, lines of response to what I uncovered:

1) Everything I wrote was a filthy lie.

and

2) Everyone already knew.

Both responses were BS. People who had been following campaign-finance for years were astounded by the level of coordination of the Pew effort and by the $123 million poured into the effort by just eight foundations.

There’s nothing criminal, there’s nothing necessarily jaw-dropping, but the press — and John McCain and Russ Feingold — had certainly never portrayed the campaign-finance reform “movement” as anything but a grassroots groundswell. Mine, I think, is the far more accurate narrative.

As for The American Prospect being the target of a “pseudo-smear campaign,” all I’ve ever done with regard to the Prospect is bring to light that the magazine ran a special issue on campaign-finance reform, called “Checkbook Democracy,” paid for with a $132,000 check from the liberal Carnegie Corporation of New York — a fact the magazine never disclosed to its readers. I talked to the Prospect’s editor before reporting this, and I believe it to have been basically an oversight (which I said in my piece).

No, no one on the right is shocked by the existence of liberal foundations. And God bless ‘em. As I’ve long said, I’m happy to see anybody and everybody spending whatever money they want promoting anything they want. What I’m not happy to see is the press treating liberal groups as neutral and conservative groups as fronts for Satan — especially when the liberal groups are trying to destroy Americans’ freedom of speech.

And, yes, as Pewgate made clear — scoff as Matt might — some of these groups are most definitely trying to “hide in the shadows.”