Wouldn't it be nice if lefty bloggers cared as much about the possible confirmation in the next week or two of Samuel Alito, as they do about their hurt feelings generated by a newspaper ombudsman's error? That the question even needs to be asked shows how unready we are to wield power in any positive way.

It's a test of priorities, of what is important and what is trivial, and we're failing it badly. "Working the ref" is something a coach does when his team has the talent to play competitively, and a little bit of verbal bullying on the margins might make a difference. Liberals aren't at that stage yet, even if we can successfully mau-mau the Washington Post into seeing things our way on the tangential issue of Jack Abramoff, his lobbying, and the highly disingenuous qualifier about whether he personally gave money to Democrats (bloggers' spin), merely directed tribes to toss them a dime (Post's spin), or convinced them to give less money to Democrats, without cutting them out (the truth).

What's really important is the corrupting influence of money in political campaigns, something that has been known to afflict a Democrat or two. Bullying newspapers into pretending that Abramoff's style of crookedness is some kind of uniquely conservative ailment, encoded in the genetic structure of Republicans, kills any effort to address that problem. To that end, real liberals back public financing of campaigns, a policy that the bloggers obsessed with Deborah Howell don't seem to care about.

Partisan media criticism is not an inevitable direction for blogs to take; witness the success of substantive bloggers like Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum, or the community building/organizing at Daily Kos. The fact that writing hate mail to newspapers seems to be the popular fad among liberal bloggers nowadays is a cancerous trend, which we must overcome to be worthy of power, in 2006 and thereafter.