Remember when liberals used to call Republicans 'mean-spirited'?

Maybe I'm the only one who remembers this, but circa 1995, it was a standard rhetorical weapon for Democrats and their media henchpeople: Newt Gingrich was an evil ogre leading a band of selfish hateful mean-spirited Republicans who were going to take turns crapping on Civil Society and wiping their butts with the Social Contract.

Seems like just yesterday, doesn't it? Now we have Harry Reid comparing health-care opponents to slaveholders and Ezra Klein accusing Joe Lieberman of mass murder, while Daily Kos and Jane Hamsher are trying to get Lieberman's wife fired.

Desperate much?

Just in case you ever doubtedthat Keith Olbermann is nuts

He's now asking the Daily Kos kooks to help him destroy Glenn Beck and Fox News:

Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes. . . . Tuesday we will expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept leads, tips, contacts, on Beck, his radio producer Burguiere, and the chief of his tv enablers, Ailes . . .

(Hat tips to Ace of Spades and Howard Portnoy in the Green Room.) Several ironies here:

• Van Jones was a relative minor administration official. It's not like he was Secretary of the Treasury. And yet his resignation -- he wasn't fired, he resigned -- is the casus belli for total war on Beck.
• It's not like Jones was sent to federal prison. (As opposed to Scooter Libby, who took the fall in the Left's PlameGate witch-hunt.) Jones will surely go on to some prestigious big-money job, plus the usual book deal, speaking engagements, etc. His "victimhood" is non-existent.
• Having Olbermann as an enemy is just another feather in Beck's cap.

So, either Olbermann is completely nuts or he's just cynical exploiting the insane rage of the Nutroots. Either way, nothing Olby does can harm Beck, and all this stunt will do is to demonstrate Olby's impotence.

Memeorandum goes nuts for this. The Jones-as-victim meme is also pushed by Alan Colmes, Jane Hamsher, Carl Pope of HuffPo and some left-wing blogger whom I never heard of until Sunday. And the same idea -- Jones victimized by vicious Republicans -- was a favorite theme of network news coverage of Jones' resignation.

The astounding disproportion between the facts -- who Van Jones is and what got him in trouble -- and the Left's perception tells you a lot about what's gone wrong in Hopeville. For all the recent uproar about Joseph Farah and "Birthers," it is the Democratic Party which suffers most from the influence of its extremist supporters.

Jane Hamsher, Alan Colmes, and Keith Olbermann apparently live inside an echo chamber where a man who was a leader of a Marxist outfit like STORM, and who subsequently signed a 9/11 Truther petition, is not legitimately controversial. (The next time Colmes goes on Fox, somebody needs to ask him, "Hey, Alan, do you think Marxism is a bad thing?")

That someone like Jones could be appointed as a White House policy "czar," and that Olbermann can't see where some people might have a problem with that, tends to disprove the worry-wart concerns of certain centrist Republicans that the GOP is the more "extreme" of the two major parties. Does anyone seriously expect an avowed "Birther" to get a White House job in the next Republican administration?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Given the state of the economy, it's very important that you hit the tip jar before you're bankrupted by the next mortgage meltdown. Now, who's in the mood for some Labor Day gloom-and-doom?

WHO HIRED VAN JONES?

Now that he's resigned -- thanks for the linky-love, Tim Blair -- we turn to Jennifer Rubin:

"The question remains: how did he get hired?"

Expect Michelle Malkin to follow up on this, but I think she already has the answer from Valerie Jarrett:

Valerie Jarrett took full credit at the nuttroots dKos blogger conference . . . for recruiting him and closely following his career:
"You guys know Van Jones? . . . Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House."

Such "creative ideas" and "all that energy"! A Yale Law grad and yet, somehow, a victim of raaaaacism!

Pejman Yousefzadeh throws some show-tune lyrics at Jones. (NTTAWWT.) The Underground Conservative and Right View from the Left Coast give up the linky-love. (NTTAWWT, either.)

UPDATE: As predicted, Michelle Malkin conducts a seminar on how the MSM has ignored and distorted the story about Van Jones.

Clintonistas boycott DailyKos

Apparently, they're serious:

I’ve decided to go on "strike" and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution. I will not be posting at DailyKos effective immediately.

(Via Memeorandum.) I say "they're serious" in the sense that they don't mean this as a joke. Not "serious" in the sense that any rational adult should take these losers seriously.

This threat from the DKos diarist "Alegre" should be a subject a widespread guffawing, but super-serious young Marc Ambinder seeks meaning in this folly:

Who Hillary Clinton is and what she represents has been THE debate among Democratic activists for years. It is now THE national debate. The Democratic Party may well come together and support its nominee. But the debate about Clinton, her (and his) politics, the legacy, the tactics -- will endure.

Dude, lighten up. It's just some disgruntled losers at DKos. I like Jammie Wearing Fool's response much better:

Pure hilarity as a moonbat circlejerk commences between Obama and Clinton supporters at the world's largest sanitarium. . . .

Memo to Alegre: Start your own blog, you idiot, if you can't handle criticism of Mrs. Clinton.

What the DKos "diarists" don't seem to understand is that they are being duped, and they've been getting duped for years. Their "diaries" and comments are not really valuable to DKos as content (although duping people into providing you with free content is a brilliant hustle), but as traffic.

The "diary" system is a hook to increase traffic. It's simple to understand: People who contribute "diaries" at DKos get a feedback-loop buzz from that experience, and thus can be counted on to click onto DKos multiple times daily. Each click counts as a "visit," and since DKos sells advertising based on its daily traffic average, each time a "diarist" clicks the site to check on comments, et cetera, he is effectively shoving money into Markos' pocket.

To be a DKos "diarist," therefore, is to be a loser by definition -- a chump, a mark, a rube. So I can't help but laugh at this boycott, especially since they call it a "strike." Hey, you morons: It would be a "strike" if you were demanding higher wages, but since you're evidently quite willing to work for free, you cannot be considered labor. Instead, you're consumers engaged in a boycott.

Don Surber responds to the DKos boycott with a post titled "Will scab for $$$$."