It was billed as a confrontation between the crusty old mainstream media and the tough and truth-telling blogoshere.

"Boy, that Michael Scherer sure took the 'pee' out of the blogosphere in his last War Room post."

Sorry, couldn't help it.

It's nice to see reflection of any sort in the news biz, though I'm interested by Scherer's choice of focus here: according to him, the blog world is relevant because it's challenging the clubbiness and overdependence on official sources of mainstream journalism, by replacing it with some kind of totally new mode of reporting.

Yet bloggers are themselves insulated in their own culture, and are are even more structurally over-reliant on (other people's) primary sources than a paper like the Times. The distinction of the blogging movement is less about a radical new way of doing news than the simple fact that they aren't as gullible, are (largely) less arrogant, and are better researchers compared to most reporters in the "MSM."

Put another way, there's no legitimate reason why every single person working in the traditional press couldn't have been doing what Kos does now for the past fifteen years. What's extraordinary is not what Kos does, but the fact that traditional reporters weren't already doing it when he came along.

It's not clear that bloggers should be doing something new with news. Maybe it's enough to just be doing the same old stuff minus all the banality and cowardice (since we're being honest here) of the traditional news institutions. But if so, let's celebrate that and call it for what it is -- a resuscitation of basic news editing by a new group of people with a new publishing paradigm. The "blogvolution," or whatever the kids are calling it, is nothing more -- or less -- than that.

Those who fail to defend that framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable.

Can I hear an "amen"?

Here's the thing about these guys: the urge toward fascism is an environmental hazard in any industrial democracy. It's always out there, and there are always cowards, bully-worshippers, and other stunted spirits who are eager to support it in any form it might take.

This fact doesn't change from decade to decade, from generation to generation. Those guys are always slouching around, mumbling hatefully to themselves and grinding their teeth in a kind of politically, ethically autistic fugue as they go about their marginalized lives.

The current American regime is no more cunning, no more ruthless, no more imaginative than these guys ever are. But their kind never appeared in public life while we had a healthy, well-defended democracy. Nobody would have let them near the levers of power.

Get that? It's not Bush. Bush and his people represent a predictable recurring phenomenon, like a seasonal flu. They've become the dangerous civic affliction that they are because neither Democrats nor Republicans have been willing to defend American society.

When history judges it will not judge Bush kindly. But it will judge you, Americans of this generation, far more harshly.

If I had to guess I'd say that the Democratic calculus goes something like this:

- If they don't give Bush what he wants, and there's a terrorist attack, the Democrats look culpable.

- If they do give Bush what he wants, and there's a terrorist attack, the Republicans and Bush in particular are left holding the bag.

- Inasmuch as the United States has proven itself quite capable of thwarting al Quaeda at home, absent criminal negligence on the part of the Cheney-Rice national security apparatus, Bush is largely in control of whether or not there is a terrorist attack.

- The more time they give the GOP to dig its own hole, the better the Democrats look in 2008.

Political jui-jitsu is fitting and even effective when employed by a minority party -- but a majority party, especially a new one which has yet to establish itself or consolidate its power, must do more than that. It must take active control of the national political discourse if it's to rule at all effectively.

Even if this is part of a Democratic strategy to discredit the GOP, at the end of the day the terms of public debate are still going to based upon fear, clouded perception of reality, and distrust of politicians in general and Democrats in particular. Pelosi and Reid have got to start playing their game more offensively or the next election is going to be about the same things as the last ones.