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Show Me the Way, to the Next Whiskey Bar

For those of you unfamiliar with The Whiskey Bar, it's a very much left-leaning blog with terrific writing. Liberal, but not the foam-at-the-mouth, diss everything Republican and so on liberal. Thoughtful and well researched.

The Whiskey Bar was great reading during the 2004 election season, but the bar abruptly closed around the time of Rathergate.

The Whiskey Bar re-opened in January, but with a different format: Collections of quotations and lifted written passages tossed together to make a point.

Finally, on March 24, Billmon - the saloon keeper - finally posted some original writing explaining why he went off the grid, why he came back and so on. Brilliant stuff, whether you're a liberal or not.

One compelling passage:

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.

And that's just a taste.

Billmon's point is that the Democrats lost because Rove and his minions really understood how the game is played today. The Whiskey Bar doesn't like this new game, but he gives the Rovarions credit for playing this game well.

Read.