"Blacklist"

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

In the middle of lambasting the Right for being what they were long before he suddenly noticed, Mr. Sullivan has been trying to pick a fight with Fox News for a couple of weeks now, going so far as to repeatedly state that he had been blacklisted (one example here):

Listen to Limbaugh, the GOP's chief spokesman. How does a Romney channel that level of viciousness and rage? Listen to Hannity. How does a smooth manager reach a base that wants the same Manichean approach to foreign policy, in which there is only ally (Israel) and enemies everywhere else (Europe, China, the Arab world, Russia)? Read Mark Levin. There are only two options now on the table, as he sees it: freedom or slavery. And a vote for Obama is a vote for slavery. 

This is the current GOP. It purges dissidents, it vaunts total loyalty, it polices discourse for any deviation. If you really have a cogent argument, you find yourself fired - like Bruce Bartlett [or?] David Frum - or subject to blacklists, like me [on?] Fox.

I understand how he feels, but Jeez, why single out Fox?

I mean, I always thought being completely ignored by the media no matter how cogent your argument, no matter how pungently or silkily you make it and no matter how many times and in how many venues you repeat it was pretty much the working definition  of "blogger".

But I was wrong and I admit it -- being completely ignored by the media is, of course, the working definition of "Liberal blogger".

After all, regardless of the raving idiocy of their individual positions and pronouncements, from Pammy Atlas to Michele Malkin to Erick son of Erick

to Dana Loesch to Ramesh Ponnuru to Box Turtle Ben Domenech, to Andrew Brietbart to Chicago's own mini-Brietbart, Warner Todd Huston...Conservative bloggers have come to expect a level of community support, respect, remuneration, media acknowledgement and even deference that Liberal bloggers long ago gave up even dreaming about.

We on the Left stand on our orange crates and shout into the Conservative and Centrist wasteland that our public dialogue has become.    We on the Left hear nothing but the wind answer us back because the goons and con men who own that wasteland -- who made that wasteland -- do not dare acknowledge that we are here and that we have been right all along.

Being a Liberal blogger, I never expect Mr. Sullivan to reply to or even acknowledge the dozens and dozens of very well-reason critiques I have laid at his door over the years, any more than I expect, say, David Brooks to take any note whatsoever of the Liberal blogosphere's fusillade of well-reasoned rebuttals and refutations that strafe his bi-weekly Reasonable Conservative midden pile to bits every single week of the year.  Any acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Liberal critiques and the overwhelming superiority of the Liberal batting average compared to the Conservative and Centrist batting averages on issue after issue would immediately reveal both the core tenet of the Right ("The Left is wrong all the time on every single issue") and the core tenet of the Center ("The Left is exactly half-wrong all the time on every single issue") to be as ridiculous as Flat Eartherism, and publicly turn their well-remunerated spokesmodels into unemployable laughingstocks.

So that's never gonna happen.

But my fellow Weblog Award winner Andrew Sullivan is not a Liberal blogger.  He is a Conservative blogger and he feels his is owed an answer -- owed the courtesy of a reply from people who have so far only paused between their many, other lies long enough to take a dump on his work before returning to their regularly scheduled propaganda.

So, let's go over that definition of "blacklist", shall we?

black·list  [blak-list] -- noun:

1. a list of persons under suspicion, disfavor, censure, etc.: His record as an anarchist put him on the government's blacklist.

2. a list privately exchanged among employers, containing the names of persons to be barred from employment because of untrustworthiness or for holding opinions considered undesirable.

Mr. Sullivan is the leading traffic-driver for the one of the largest news sites in the world.

He gets his books published at-will.

He can appear on teevee programs ranging from "C-Span" to "Real Time" to "Hardball" to "Anderson Cooper 360" very much as it suits him.

He can get his often ridiculous opinions printed in prominent, global-reach newspapers and periodicals ranging from "The Atlantic" to "The New Republic" to "The New York Times" whenever he pleases.

And two weeks ago, his boss handed him the front page of "Newsweek" magazine.

See, this is not the media biography of someone who has been "blacklisted": this is the media biography of a fully-initiated member of the Club.

However if you would like the know what the media biography of someone who has been blacklisted looks like, it's pretty easy.

All you have to do is ask any Liberal blogger.