Kicking Alterman's Ass

This post from Will Wikinson at The Fly Bottle is a couple of days old, but it's a beaut.

A sample:

Eric Alterman's series on the devious, conspiratorial funding of "right wing" organizations is a great example of the left's misguided retardo-Marxist cui bono obsession. It absolutely mystifies me why the left spends so much energy tracking down funding sources of the right. I always detect in these things a ostrich-like refusal to seriously engage the fact that the left has for the last 20 years been getting its ass handed to it intellectually.

This is so noxious to the left's self-image that they can do nothing but go deep into denial, and complain incessantly about, what? . . . Just how smart those the right-wing plutocrats are? Concede relative strategic incompetence in order to preserve the illusion of the moral/intellectual high ground? I really don't get it. What, really, is the point of this stuff?

(I mean, think about it this way: if I was paid to kick Eric Alterman's ass, but I had very much wanted to kick Alterman's ass anyway, and I proceeded to kick Alterman's ass, Alterman's pointing out that I was paid to kick his ass neither shows that I wouldn't have kicked his ass if I hadn't been paid, nor that his ass wasn't, in fact, kicked, nor that Alterman could have kicked my ass if only he had been paid. So why bring it up? Does it make him feel better? [By the way, I do not, in fact, have any desire to kick Alterman's ass.])

Kinda makes you want to read the whole thing, doesn't it?