http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/12/is-february-10t.html

What boils in the hearts of these people, if they indeed have hearts, is hate born of humiliation. The pattern goes back to the end of the Nixon years when Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Quayle, and Grover Norquist among others were humiliated by what they perceived as unfair treatment at the hands of the “liberal elite.” The “progressives” among us, in other words hippies, owned the media. We used our own information services to bring back news from the Vietnam War. We staged protests. We caught media attention.

The faction that served Nixon in those years were woefully ignorant of the power of media, but they realized that they would need to “own” the media in order to turn the tables. Hence the emergence of Fox News, The Washington Post and other venues owned by
right wing bastards like Rupert Murdoch and Sun Yung Moon.

And now the tables have turned again, and the tin hat right wingers are back at it like spoiled brats determined to smear mud on the rest of us.

One thing to keep in mind is that anything we do must carefully avoid unnecessary pushing of the buttons these guys are flashing at us. As with all people we must behave with respect, and this in itself will defuse much of what they try to do.

We “own” the media now, in the form of the Internet. We can expect the fanatical right to attempt to monopolize that too, and if they do, the pendulum will swing back in their direction. We must protect the Web with our lives.