Steve Gilliard

Steve Gilliard is dead. I don't know these people, I don't pretend to.
But I am moved by his death, because he was such a passionate voice
railing against what is going so terribly wrong with this country right
now. Others will eulogize him much better than I, of course, but to me,
he was the ultimate manifestation of why this medium is so different,
and most remarkably so important. Venture capitalists and visionaries
who spot trends speak of community and viral networks, but at the end
of the day, we've got to keep in mind that the blogosphere , for all
it's faults, is not a business proposition or a social network. At the
beginning and at the end, it is a revolution in discourse. Those that
equate Kos and Atrios with Tom Paine are probably closest to the truth.

Gilliard, to me, represented the most pure manifestation of the revolution. Unapologetically profane, blunt, and willing to call bullshit on friend and foe when the time was right, he understood that blogging is not reporting, not
editorializing, and not "commentary". It is, of course, like nothing
else. Bloggers like Gilliard are expert at what they know, and unashamed
of it. He loved New York, he understood it like no one I've read. His
posts on Giuliani and Bloomberg, on Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima , and
remarkably, on the transit strike of December 2005 placed those events
into the larger responsibilities of our vocation as liberals. He
blogged on the Mets and the Yankees. He knew baseball and that matters, of course.

The other thing that Gilliard knew, as those of us who read him know, was military history. He understood that our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq was ill conceived and fraught with risk. He was a voracious reader who read every available tome on our nations military exploits that he could put his hands on, according to this remembrance by Jane Hamser.

As I posted months ago, he understood that our efforts in Sadr City are a
fool's errand, a death trap for our military, and he clearly understood
that Muqtada al Sadr is waiting us out, allowing us to do his dirty
work. Read James Wolcott. Perhaps his words, more than any other,
illustrate the confluence of old media with new. It beggars belief that
this man thought more deeply than Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz or Perle that what we undertook in Mesopotamia was unhistorical and suicidal. I shudder at the thought of Steve Gilliard and Bill Kristol in the same room.

Our last best hope is that everything that Steve Gilliard predicted will not come true. I'll not bet against him.