Crashing the Gate, by Jerome Armstrong (myDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Kos of daily Kos fame...) is a prescription for liberal electoral success...in Narnia or some other imaginary land.

I say that not having read the book, which admittedly suggests a certain amount of hubris, but having been a long-time Kos reader, I was always struck by how completely other-worldly the Kos perspective was. I've mentioned several times over the years the utter delusion present on a daily basis at the Daily Kos leading up to the 2002 election. Kos has of course disclosed the views he presents in Crashing the Gate in numerous public forums as well as on-line which gave me some insight into what he would commit to print.

Someone who has read the book though is Josh Trevino, who writes a devastating review that confirms every expectation I had.

It's a deeply silly exegesis of the events in question -- any bets on how often Moulitsas found himself "silenced," pre-blog, in Berkeley? But it is revelatory for this: it reveals him as an archetype -- an American leftist who cannot understand why his party is in the minority, who grasps at resentful myths like the martyrdom of Max Cleland and the theft of Florida 2000, and who conjures up an imaginary quasi-fascist society in place of the actual America in which to set anecdotes of persecution. This man, and his friend, want to fix the Democratic Party. As a Republican, I can only urge that party to take them up on the offer.

Good prescriptions spring from good analyses. The analyses in Crashing the Gates veer wildly from insightful to awful.

It seems to me that good advice has to start with a firm grasp of reality and while lefty fantasies are great for creating a thriving on-line community, I wouldn't run an election campaign on them.

Worth reading.