Remember a few months ago when it was thought the liberal blogosphere would propel Howard Dean into the White House? (The picture of Glenn Reynolds, alias Instapundit, is from Harvard.)

It turned out to be amazingly easy to kill.

First, John Kerry's campaign went under the bloggers to win Iowa, and the nomination. We've covered that before.

Now the conservative blogosphere has apparently finished the job.

The links between the party and its blogosphere were cut very neatly with a few phony controversies.

First, South Dakota Congressional candidate Stephanie Herseth was accused of running a "secret Web page." What she had was a landing page from her Blogads to a contribution site. It wasn't a secret. The whole charge was a lie.

But she ran away, pulling her ads from bloggers' sites and (presumably) eliminating her take from out-of-state citizens.

The second step, apparently launched by Glenn Reynolds and some even less-scrupulous buddies, was to create a phony controversy over Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, alias Daily Kos. (Pictured here from his own site.)

In a comment thread under his blog, Kos made mention of not being upset over the deaths of four mercenaries in Falluja last week. Given that Kos is a Salvadoran native, and given the role of mercenaries in imposing fascist dictators on Latins over the century, it was an understandable outburst.

But the right-wing blogosphere turned up the heat on this "scandal" (what - no mourning for our heroes, you traitor!) so that Kos' Congressional advertisers ran for their lives, and the Kerry campaign dropped their links to him.

Angry over Kos' treatment by Democrats a second major liberal blogger, Atrios, dropped many of his own links.

Now, add in the Bush legal attack against 527 groups and against non-profits speaking out against the Administration, and you have a very neat triple play. You could also have the death of democracy (small d) in America.

Oh, and as to my own personal opinion? If Democrats want to ever gain power again, they had better become as ruthless as these Republicans are. If they fail to show backbone they will deserve to lose.