by Lynnell Mickelsen

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone says the right-wing talkers are basically toast. As evidence, he looks at the dust-up between Bill O'Reilly on David Letterman's show last week.

"On the surface it looked like a seminal moment in modern television history, a Godzilla v. Megalon monster epic in which Godzilla was finally toppled just outside the Tokyo city gates. Keeled over, its rubber eyes flitting dumbly against the cardboard landscape, we finally saw the great lizard's vulnerable side. It was almost possible to feel sorry for Bill O'Reilly, who had trotted out on set with the peace-offering of a plastic sword and shield, expecting to make nice with his fellow overpaid TV icon -- but who instead ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass.

For the rest of his days, few people will forget the image of O'Reilly sitting glumly and taking it while some smug ex-weatherman called him a "bonehead" to raucous studio applause."

I didn't see the show, so I'll have to take Matt's word for it. And I hope he's right about this being the beginning of the end for the right-wing in the media. But Taibbi actually saves his real ire for the "Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all."

Myself, I want to see Bush, Cheny and Rummy all in the dock at the Hague. But I agree with Matt Taibbi on the culpability of the corporate media types. Yes, he says, the so-called mainstream media is finally becoming a bit more critical of Bush and his gang, but as he points out....

"It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside.

"It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient.

"We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later.

"We needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share."

Go Matt go. Alas, I'm even more cynical than he is. Taibbi seems to think the worst of the media collusion with the Republicans is past. I'm not so sure. If the Dems take control of the House and the Senate, I predict the Republican Right will go back to the role that it plays best---the victimized outsiders blaming liberals for basically having to clean up the GOP mess. Because for the last six years, Repubs haven't seemed interested in actually governing. They see government primarily as a cash register for their business pals, so they'd rather simply loot the treasury rather than, say,help anyone. Besides, helping people makes them weak. It's odd that a group of people so supposedly opposed to Darwin would work so hard for a Darwinian surivial of the fittest in their own communities.

But I digress. Back to Taibbi and his take on the corporate media. I predict that if the Dems actually take the House, the media will revert back to all-Dem scandals all-the-time. Gentlemen, start your fax machines.

Anyhow, go read the Taibbi's whole piece here .