Bill O'Reilly vs. DailyKos

This weekend is the second annual YearlyKos Convention (probably not as fun as Comic Con)... a gathering of liberal bloggers and Democratic party activists where they discuss issues important to them. It's a major event, with most of the '08 front-runners attending. TPMtv has been doing good video podcasts from the conference (the official YearlyKos site has video too).

For reasons both obvious and not, this is driving people like Bill O'Reilly insane. Mr. Falafel himself has spent the last two weeks on his show (hey, it's not like there's a war(s) going on or anything) ranting about the convention and its founders from the DailyKos website, accusing them of being vile and among the worst things on the internet (really? worse than pterodactyl porn??).

Chris Dodd appeared (poor guy) on the show to defend DailyKos-



Money quote: "Don't suggest here that this is a real debate you're having here about DailyKos. You object to the ideology; you're using a few instances here, that everyone would find objectionable, as a way of suggesting we ought not to participate. That's terribly wrong in my view."

Ol' Bill'O, of course, like most of his generation, is trying to play on fears of phantom hippies to get people equating the suit-wearing, laptop-wielding YearlyKos crowd with the disheveled masses outside the '68 Democratic Convention battling the police. But, as the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum notes, "What's happening now isn't a youth revolt, and it's not powered by free love, free acid, or fear of being drafted. It's powered by a lot of ordinary moderate liberals who have been radicalized by George Bush and the Newt Gingrichized Republican Party. I think a lot of journalists... don't quite get this."

I'd also note that if that Bush/Lieberman photoshop job was the worst, most vile thing that Bill'O could find in the thousands of diaries and user pages at Daily Kos, then it's a cleaner site than even I thought. Kudos, Bill.

Finally, that al Qaeda/San Francisco quote that Sen. Dodd mentioned, which Bill'O denied even existing? I know this will blow your mind, but Sen. Dodd is 100% correct... Bill'O did indeed say it in November 2005.

[PS- While right-wing blogs and pundits were bloviating about YearlyKos, the President of the United States was meeting with this super-non-partisan brain-trust: Glenn Beck, Bill Bennett, Neal Boortz, Scott Hennon, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larson, Mark Levin, Michael Medved, Janet Parshall and Hugh Hewitt. None of whom, of course, has ever said or done anything vile. *cough*]