Think about it.  

In the US the liberals are ahead in the blogosphere, with Kos and The Huffington Post leading the way.  Yes the right has some immensely popular blogs, Michelle Malkin and Instapundit to name but two, but it's the left who have mastered the blogosphere for news distribution and activism - mainly because they have an incumbent government to rally against.  However they have also tended to represent the more radical cutting edge of the Democratic Party, the hard left.  

A disillusioned, but still avowedly conservative electorate, is still mistrustful of a Democratic Party that is ill disciplined, elitist and morally out-of-touch.  Now with centrists such as Hilary and Mark Warner looking to drag the party back to electability, it is the leftwing blogs who remain a source of ideological self-criticism, embarrassingly pulling the party back to the left.  The rightwing media machine is highlighting Democrat blogging radicalism as proof that the liberals do not understand post-911 America, and that the Dems are a haven of the "loony left."  

On the first night of 18doughtystreet the channel couldn't wait to sink its teeth into the BBC, an institution still very much close to the nations heart.  The foreign analysts were some of the hawkish I had heard this side of the pond, and were totally at odds with a British people who are fuming about Iraq, and are terrified we'll make the same mistake in Iran.  Halfway through the first nights output I was smiling.  The blinkered rightwing chaff that was being peddled was just the sort of thing Slippery Dave is trying to paper over.  Brilliant.

After pouring another cup of tea my night got even better, when halfway through Iain Dale's Vox Politic show, he cut to a saccharine slow-mo video homage to Thatcher.  Wow, I thought, it's all been a con; Iain Dale is a Labour mole, buried deep in the Tory base he is subverting Slippery Dave's new `Liberal Conservatism' from within.  Genius.  Using horrifying images of The Thatch, Dale was pulling the new clothes from Cameron, exposing the boom and bust Thatcherite sentiment that still powers the grassroots party.  

When Francis Maude next champions the Tory bloggers he seems so enchanted by, maybe he should look over the pond and decide whether in the end, they'll do more harm than good?

From tygerland.net