POSSIBLY THE DUMBEST THING DAVE WEIGEL HAS EVER WRITTEN

Teabagging demagogue Allen West was not pleased with the Huffington Post/AOL merger:

Florida Republican Rep. Allen West said Tuesday that AOL's purchase of the Huffington Post is a threat to tea party groups' online presence....

"You look out there, you see that AOL has purchased the Huffington Post. Now all of a sudden a very far left liberal blogger such as Arianna Huffington has a huge influence in the Internet world," he said....

I expect something like this from West. I don't expect David Weigel, who's usually a bright guy, to agree with him, offering this as an explanation for why West has a point:

...According to progressives, is the sequence of events that brought down ACORN:

- The Leadership Institute trained James O'Keefe
- O'Keefe gave his ACORN videos to BigGovernment
- The videos were previewed for Glenn Beck
- BigGovernment and Fox (and other NewsCorp properties) reported every inch of the ACORN story
- Democrats, spooked, defunded ACORN

So: Imagine a future in which AOL, the online portal for millions of people, farms out its news content to the Huffington Post. Imagine a future in which Yahoo!, the online portal for millions of similar people, hires the deputy publisher of Talking Points Memo to launch its blog network.

For a progressive who thinks the Internet is increasingly driving the narrative, this is heartening. For a conservative, it's terrifying. Allen West is on to something.

Um, no, Allen West isn't on to something.

In his summary of the ACORN narrative, Weigel lists five steps. Actually there are a few he left out:

- The Leadership Institute trained James O'Keefe
- O'Keefe gave his ACORN videos to BigGovernment
- The videos were previewed for Glenn Beck
- BigGovernment and Fox (and other NewsCorp properties) reported every inch of the ACORN story
- Right-wing media outlets not owned by Rupert Murdoch -- i.e., all of talk radio -- picked up the ACORN story and hammered away at it incessantly
- Non-right-wing media outlets also ran with the story in order to assuage their sense of liberal guilt
- The entire Republican Party got on the ACORN-is-the-Antichrist bandwagon and worked ACORN demonization -- rhetorically and legislatively -- until it began to produce a huge payoff
- Democrats, spooked, defunded ACORN

Those are the steps that will never, ever happen for our side. Allen West has nothing to worry about.

****

Oh, and if you really believe that Arianna is a dyed-in-the-wool lefty who's going to make AOL a dyed-in-the-wool lefty portal, Dana Milbank has a history lesson for you.