Three cheers for Chris Dodd. Dodd will appear on "The Felafel O'Reilly Factor" tomorrow night to defend YearlyKos and the blogsophere in general from the bizarre crusade launched recently by everyone's least favorite perv.
Exclusive: Dodd To Go On O'Reilly Show To Defend YearlyKos
Dem Presidential candidate Chris Dodd has agreed to go on Bill O'Reilly's show to defend YearlyKos against O'Reilly's ongoing assault against the gathering and against DailyKos, Dodd's spokesperson confirmed to Election Central.
The move is significant because it will make Dodd the first Presidential candidate to personally appear on a leading right-wing show for the explicit purpose of defending the liberal blogosphere. It's got to be seen as a sign of the times -- and of current shifts in Democratic politics -- that a Presidential candidate would view such an appearance in defense of Kos' liberal blogging community and the netroots in general as an asset to a Presidential campaign.
Dodd's spokesperson, Hari Sevugan, tells Election Central that the Senator will hit O'Reilly hard for his smear tactic of selecting a few isolated comments out of literally hundreds of thousands or even millions of comments to smear the whole site and the netroots in general.
"Democrats aren't going to be lectured to by Bill O'Reilly about the crudeness of language," Sevugan says. "Senator Dodd will point out O'Reilly's hypocrisy in singling out a handful of these comments and talking about how extreme they are when many of the comments O'Reilly himself has made have been equally extreme and disturbing."
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That Dodd would see the potential for political gain in such a move is representative of a larger development in Campaign 2008 that we've noted here before: The more and more frequent use by the Dem campaigns of aggressive pushback against right wing media figures, on behalf of themselves and others, to appeal to Dem primary voters in general and the netroots in particular. We've already seen Bill Clinton's on-air criticism of Fox News' Chris Wallace, the Edwards' campaign's repeated attacks on Ann Coulter, and the Dem boycotts of the Fox-sponsored debates.
And now Dodd's appearance on O'Reilly. The Dodd campaign -- like the other campaigns -- has aggressively courted the lib blogosphere, defending YearlyKos early on and signing up with the Reid-Feingold Iraq withdrawal amendment, among other things.
Well done, Senator Dodd.
It really is pretty amazing when you think about it. As my Dark Overlord Markos put it yesterday:
I want to point something else out here, however. Take a look at what's happening. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, a multi-kajillion dollar company, is having to battle us. And they're having to do it as equals. They're a giant, well-financed corporation: we're a damn collection of websites and grassroots groups. We took away their ability to host Democratic presidential debates: they struck back by launching an on-air battle against one of the YearlyKos sponsors.
They've launched themselves into a pathetic tit-for-tat, now choosing to take time out of their busy schedule of lying about the news to making conservatives feel better about themselves in order to start lying about us, because we're finally to the point where we're starting to threaten their abilities to get away with their manipulative, hatemongering crap -- redbaiting, anti-patriotic blubbering that went out of style decades ago among all Americans but the most trembling and fear-driven and bigoted. They're battling us on equal terms because they have to. And by mere virtue of that fact, we're winning.
To think that this movement would have grown so in such a short period of time to the point that we warrant the attention of a MEGACORP like FAUX is pretty stunning. And we are winning. We are winning because people like Chris Dodd, a man who is running for president, fer chrissakes, aren't taking it anymore. They are calling BS on this crap and people are listening. The days where blowhards like Felafel Boy could shoot their mouths off unchecked, where they could bully progressives with no consequences, where they hogged the mic, are over, friends. |
