Their pleas were answered. Liberal blog Think Progress led the way with 655 comments on a post about the Gore story. Daily Kos was close behind with 481 comments. And 125 comments are attached to the Johnson-Boyce call-to-action post.

All this added up to one giant headache for Drew Johnson, who didn’t know where to turn to respond to the attacks being lodged at him personally, his employees and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. While the initial Gore story received favorable coverage from conservative bloggers, these same people were silent when liberals began to distort the record.

One of the most outrageous charges, Johnson said, had to do with his background. The liberal "watchdog" Media Matters dug into Johnson’s past, noting that he had been a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Since ExxonMobil has contributed to AEI, that bit of information was enough for Media Matters to assert that Johnson was bought and paid for by ExxonMobil. Immediately, the liberal echo chamber began to hype the allegation, though Johnson swiftly denied it. Johnson had merely interned at AEI. Neither he nor the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has ever received money from ExxonMobil. But that didn’t stop MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann from playing up the mythical connection.

Instead of backing down and retreating, the episode has inspired Johnson. His three days of meetings in the nation’s capital introduced him to a wider network of contacts and left him eager to help build a network of bloggers who could defend conservatives under attack.

He has also hired an investigative reporter to produce more stories similar to the one about Gore -- an unorthodox tactic for a think tank. But Johnson said sometimes that’s what it takes to discover the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be for him personally.