Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- Fundraiser Day One: UPDATE

It was yet another Sunday of discredited war-criminals like Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol and bleating Conservative hacks like Peggy Noonan, Alex Castellanos and S.E. Cupp fished out of the nations's intellectual septic tank and plopped uncritically in front of the nation's teevee cameras.

It was as bad and trifling and utterly predictable as always.  I'm sure others will have something to say about it*, but having temporarily run short of adjectives to write one more review of the same ghastly restaurant slinging the same ptomaine-slick gruel I will instead opt to climb down, down, down into the cool, dark, undisturbed archives of the late Steve Gilliard to retrieve a piece of something he wrote back in March of 2005.

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I know many of you don't think this is a big deal. The panels suck, TV sucks, who cares who does it.

Well, if they're gonna have a sitdown, we're gonna sit at the table, even if we have to knock the legs off the fucking table first.

Remember when people laughed at the Christian Coalition while they took over state parties? They're cranks, they won't win. Well, while we were laughing, they were winning.

I feel bad that it's been beat up on Wonkette time. I do not have a grudge against her, but it's about effectiveness. If we want to demand the DLC shut up because they lose, how in good conscience can we let her go on these shows and get waxed by the plutocrats at Powerline and Instacracker. She wants a book deal? Cool. Let her have one. It's a lot less glamorous than you would think, believe me. She wants to be on TV, fine. But not as a liberal blogger.

This is the second time in three months this has happened. First Harvard, now this.

When Grant took over the Union Army, he was asked what he would do to stop Lee. He said, simply, "Whereever Lee goes, I shall follow." Well, where ever Instacracker goes, I want someone there to nail his ass. Being on Air America is great, but that's just expanding the choir. We need to have the same respect, be in the same places, pressing them on their bullshit and challenging them. Every time they get to speak freely, we lose. Every time they get the imprimatur of respect, we lose. Unless we are there, side by side, no matter how much work we do, we will be deemed second rate. To defend our ideas, we have to be in a forum to defend them.

How effective can this be?

When Al Franken went after Bill O'Reilly, he made him look like a fool. He stood up to him and O'Reilly never recovered from that. You think that woman would have gotten a judgment if O'Reilly hadn't been softened up by Franken? We need to take these people on, in public, and hammer them with no mercy.

We have the numbers, we have the influence. Name a GOP site which has raised $100K for a candidate? Name one with a thriving, active community, one which actually does things. Kos gets more hits than Instapundit and is the heart of online activism, with a hundred different voices speaking out.

Instacracker doesn't even have comments.

The right blogosphere relies on hype and media support to pretend they're doing more than being Bush's lackies. We have a media which thinks fairness is having a liar on with a historian. We cannot become complacent and wash our hands of the media. We must engage it and use it to our advantage We don't have to like the rules, but we better play the game or they will play it without us.

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This Sunday we got Alex Castellanos, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, David Gregory, Peggy Noonan, S.E. Cupp and, like virtually every Sunday, not a genuine, knives-out Liberal anywhere in sight.

They're playing the game without us.

And they will continue to do so as long as they are permitted to pretend we do not exist.


UPDATE: Other's did indeed have things to say about it.*

From Mr. Charles Pierce:

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The Clinton Guy should be ashamed. ABC should be ashamed. Hell, the human race should be ashamed. Giving any further airtime to this man that doesn't take place in front of one tribunal or another -- much less, getting him on there and simply letting him spout the way ABC did -- is a crime against humanity. Richard Cheney is the least excusable American human being of the last half-century. That should at least be acknowledged. More to the point, he's mindnumbingly, crashingly stupid, less trustworthy around facts than he is around a shotgun. If ABC wants to do a 15-minute infomercial for war crimes, it needs better production values and a casting director.

On the non-psycho-killer front, a lot of the talk was about the scandalous -- SCANDALOUS!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!! -- developments in Rollout-ghazi-gate. (I'm am starting to hear now from people who enrolled via the 1-800 number and who had no trouble at all. This should give pause to our young techie liberal friends with their cadillac health plans about the "honesty" of their superheated criticism. Yep, Ezra, it's called a telephone. Ask your grandpa.) Over at Disco Dave's Disco Dance Party, the Dancin' Master hosted lying cheese-wheel Alex (Black Hands) Castellanos, who proceeded to lie about the entire social safety net. In this, he was aided, through the curious policies of the NBC News booking staff, by failed politician -- and soon-to-be-failed movie mogul -- Rick Santorum, and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is?

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