Like Tom DeLay, Bill O’Reilly remains one of America’s foremost hypocrites. Over the last two weeks, Bill O’Reilly led a witchhunt after DailyKos and now he appears to be broadening his efforts to demonize all liberal bloggers.

O’Reilly suggests that what liberal bloggers are doing is blackmailing politicians by banding together and telling politicians that to receive bloggers’ support, a politician must advance a particular point of view on a particular issue.

Bloggers threatening — you know, what people don’t understand is that these Internet bloggers give messages to these candidates: “If you don’t do what we tell you to do, we will trash you and try to interfere with your fundraising.”
…
…I think it’s a danger to have blackmailers, which is what these bloggers are, active in the political process. [source: media matters]

Whether it’s paid lobbyists, grassroots organizations, the Religious Right and even individual voters, each and every one of them conditions its support for a politician on how well that person is representing them. This isn’t blackmail, Bill. It IS the democratic process.

Frankly to suggest otherwise frightens me. Perhaps we should let politicians or windbag Fox News pundits tell us the issues that are important and which ones are not. Maybe the government should be in charge?

I can see why he feels the need to lash out at all of us. No one loves a hypocrite more than a blogger and he’s one of the biggest.

Glenn Greenwald has gathered a brilliant collection of Blog Hater quotes. From waterboarding proponent John Yoo to poor Time reporter Joe Klein, Greenwald catalogs a series of gripes against the blogosphere…claiming mostly that we’re skeptical parasites who spend their time mouthing off at home, probably in pajamas. Read the entire Salon article to get the complete picture, but here’s how Greenwald sums up why the smug, sneaky bastards keep sniping at the blogs…

There is much to learn from the contempt expressed by John Yoo, Joe Klein and Jon Alter towards blogs — i.e., a collection of hundreds of thousands of politically engaged citizens who are dissatisfied with the prevailing political and media power centers and have created their own instruments for expressing and activating that dissatisfaction.

It is absolutely true that citizens are forced to rely upon large media organizations to collect information and report what the government is doing, and that is precisely why their profound failures are of such concern. And the isolated and all-too-few instances of real adversarial and investigative reporting (see e.g., Dana Priest and Charlie Savage) sadly illustrate what this country has been so sorely lacking.

These blogging instruments prevent people like Yoo, Klein and Alter (and Brian Williams) from making pronouncements without being challenged and corrected, and it undermines the authoritative opinion-making monopoly they once held. I wonder if that has anything to do with the contempt they feel.

I couldn’t agree more.