Far right columnist Michael Kelly was killed in a humvee accident in Iraq this morning. My condolences to his family, and my thoughts to the soldiers and civilians who each day face the consequences of what he wrote. It is appropriate to remove the quotes from the blogroll link; he turns to have been all too real.

UPDATE: Over the course of the day, I've had an opportunity to read some of the reaction elsewhere to Mr. Kelly's untimely passing. As expected, conservatives have been devastated, while liberal reaction has ranged from expressing sympathy to his family and a grudging respect for him having the balls to put himself in harms way, to schadenfreude, noting in particular how common that reaction was among the wingnuts following the deaths of Paul Wellstone and Rachel Corrie. More than a few have taken the line expressed by Joshua Marshall, which was to call him on his hysterical pontificating in his columns, but granting him his props for his abilities as an editor (focused usually on his tenure with the Atlantic Monthly; his shameful tenure at the New Republic in the mid-90's, where he published just about every discredited rumor about the Clintons, and championed the career of Stephen Glass, is conveniently forgotten). I drafted a comment over at Daily Kos that I will re-publish here, as it best reflects how I feel about this tragedy:

It's possible to mourn the loss of someone, to give condolences to the family he left behind (as well as the unnamed soldier who died with him), and still remember that his columns were a principal factor in the decline in political civility over the past decade. I won't miss his nasty, unkind shots at each and every left-of-center public figure, but, as with the death of Barbara Olsen, I grieve for the loss. Maybe having seen the war up-close, he would have been less enthusiastic about sending others into harms way; he was one of the few chickenhawks who put his ass on the line in Iraq. For all we know, had he lived, he may have a mid-life conversion, in the same way David Brock did. Dying before his time means we'll never know.