"I have in my hands a list...."

As things start looking ever more bleak for the administration and their supporters on the reactionary right, the tactics they're using to regain positive attention and squelch opposition are looking more and more desperate and absurd.

First, we have the White House's embarrassing insistence on recycling years-old talking points on pre-war Iraq intelligence.

Second, there's the old standby of attacking your opponents' navigational skills after you were given the reins and managed to steer the buggy directly into a ditch-- while ignoring all advice from the opposition.

Now we've got the likes of Bill O'Reilly-- who's managing to establish a reputation for himself as the biggest horse's ass in political commentary by threatening to publish a good ol' fashioned "enemies list" on his website. Which, in the greatest tradition of American journalism, requires you to pay to get his obtuse ravings. A real man of the people, who decides to supplement his multi-million dollar income by charging deluded seniors money to get more of his nonsense.

In O’Reilly’s view the only real problem is the “internet smear sites” drawing attention to his comments:

Some far left internet smear sites have launched a campaign to get me fired over my point of view. I believe they do this on a daily basis. This time the theme is O’Reilly is encouraging terrorist attacks. Unbelievably stupid. Not unusual with these guttersnipes.

Fairly typical comments from O’Reilly. But he added an unusual twist. O’Reilly promised to publish the names of everyone who supported these “internet smear sites” on his website:

I’m glad the smear sites made a big deal out of it. Now we can all know who was with the anti-military internet crowd. We’ll post the names of all who support the smear merchants on billoreilly.com. So check with us.

It’s unclear where O’Reilly would find such a list. But since he has labeled everyone who supports websites like MediaMatters.org and ThinkProgress.org as “anti-military” it seems to be an effort to intimidate and shame our readers.

Stick to jerking off over phone sex calls to your underlings, douchebag. And hire an editor. Even the president knows that 'Internets' is capitalized.

To shift gears a bit, I'd like to remind people that most every right-wing site likes to maintain a stacked deck. They don't allow reader comments, they rewrite posts after the fact to allow themselves an out, or just plain lie about their previous scribblings.

I mention this because just today I saw something by a journalist accusing blogs of being nothing more than propaganda outlets. What it failed to acknowledge, as always, is the disparity between self-imposed standards between progressive and reactionary blogs. I have a tiny readership, but even so I allow any and all to comment (and I've never deleted a comment) and when I learn after the fact that I made an error I cop to it in an update.