Anonymous commenter, time to come clean

I just received a comment that is highly critical of Dr. David Brailer based on his time as CEO of CareScience, a company he sold to Quovadx before he started consulting with the Bush administration a year before being named national health IT coordinator. I’d love to publish the comment, but first, I’d like the person responsible for it to identify himself or herself, or at least show me some proof of the statements made. Call it journalistic ethics, but I have a problem with trashing someone anonymously.

FYI, I do moderate the comments as a way of preventing spammers from advertising things like Viagra and penny stocks. The comments come to me as e-mails from Blogger, the blog service I use, so if a person wishes to remain anonymous, I have no way of figuring out a would-be poster’s identity.

And now, I want to lose my objectivity for a moment and wish a speedy recovery to Scott Wallace, CEO of the National Alliance for Health Information Technology, who suffered a heart attack a couple of weeks ago. From what I understand, he is progressing and is expected to be at the Alliance’s annual meeting next week.