Steve Gilliard: I'm a fighting liberal

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.... - December 3, 2003

Meteor Blades also has a favorite Steve Gilliard blog post that rips Ann Coulter for her insults and ignorance of history.

Now, there are plenty of other sites which will deconstruct her monstrous book, Treason, and I would rather watch Shrek than read her drivel, but what I wanted to point out and what I think is relevant, is the way she abuses history to make her point. She's not the only one, and we'll get to that a bit later.

But Coulter uses the one crime defined by the constitution. Claiming that Molly Ivins is a friend of treason is an abuse of the term to such a degree, it would be comical, if Coulter wasn't on TV selling her book.

But what I want to discuss are not her unhinged insults, but her contention that Joe McCarthy, a drunken bum and liar, was actually brought down by the left. It is an assertion which borders on rank stupidity and is patently untrue.

Joe McCarthy was brought down by the US Army and Republicans. Not the left, not communist sympathizers or the Hollywood Ten. The Army detested McCarthy... What people have to remember is that history is not just opinion. It is fact. It is the report of witnesses. Ann Coulter can play games with Joe McCarthy's legacy, but his words are transcribed for anyone to read....

Steve Gilliard was a big fan of the left that actually does something, not the New Left engaged in intellectual circle jerks or meaningless theatrical protests. He was also well read in history and knew the most meaningful progress for most workers occurred in 1946 with the passage of the GI Bill and the model UAW contract. He remarked on both early this year.

I didn't link to him nearly enough when he was alive.

Kos writes about knowing him here.

Steve, in fact, was the first person I ever approached with the "guest blogger" offer. And he didn't waste time getting started, drawing on history of the region and the British occupation of Iraq in the late 1910s to set the stage for what the US would soon face in Iraq. He was frighteningly prescient on Iraq, and it wasn't the only topic he would consistently nail. He was a credit to the progressive blogosphere.

Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage. And he got it with the News Blog, which he soon built into a full-time gig, still a rarity among bloggers. It was one of three sites I religiously checked more than three times a day.

If you knew Steve only from his blog, you'd think he was a pit bull. He was blunt, loud, aggressive, unafraid, and took no prisoners.

But you'd meet him in life, and he was the exact opposite. He was soft-spoken, shy, modest, calm, friendly, and -- this was the most surprising to me -- gentle.

He has a wiki. He is known on the right for photo-shopping a black politician into blackface for his Uncle Tom subservience to the Republican Party. As a black person he felt more entitled to do that but removed the picture.

As with most bloggers, I didn't even know Steve Gilliard was black. He was extremely outraged by racial bias, but he was outraged by anti-gay bias, and prejudice against women and the entire conservative bag of outrages. Us liberals simply knew he was one of us.

NYTimes - Blog Caucus. Obit.

Tags: Steve Gilliard, obit