Interesting. E.J. Dionne has a very perceptive column today in which he writes about Yearly Kos (my buddy Pastor Dan is in Chicago right now, hobnobbing with the other “hate site” types that bug Bill O’Reilly so much) and how Kos is, in fact, the Rush Limbaugh of the aughts; how Kos in particular, but maybe Left Blogistan in general, is rallying the left in exactly the same manner that Limbaugh and the legion of imitators who followed rallied the right in the early 1990s.

As Dionne notes, O’Reilly’s rage has been stoked by the fact that Democratic presidential candidates have gone to Daily Kos - much in the way Cheney, et al, have appeared on Limbaugh’s program. They do so because Kos himself - Markos Moulitsas - “has started to beat Limbaugh and O’Reilly at their own game.”

Writes Dionne: “No wonder O’Reilly is so annoyed.”

But this goes beyond merely annoying the right, as Josh  Marshall notes in a reaction to Dionne’s piece: What’s happening now with Yearly Kos, with Left Blogistan itself, Marshall writes, is far more participatory than classic conservative talk radio, and fueled by the technology itself:

The key to understanding all this, I think — and I’ll leave this to another post — is to get a proper handle on the interplay between the media technologies, the wave of organizational fervor that they are both helping to generate and also being sustained by, and the ideological shifts that seem to be sweeping over the body politic.

It is, in other words, a sort of dual-edged sword; partisans have been able to use the technology of the web both to harness the fervor and drive the ideological shift. And it is now conservatives who find themselves “pathetically wrong-footed or out of date on all these new ways of mobilizing and connecting with voters.”

Put it all another way:

Something’s happening but you don’t know what it is - do you, Mr. O’Reilly?