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What has Billo's knickers in a twist tonight? Tony Snow appeared on Bill Maher's Real Time with *gasp* an audience and panel not consisting of an echo chamber. Quelle horreur! And to make matters worse, one of the people looking to inject some reality into Tony Snow's cheerleading was Billo's nemesis Mark Cuban. It is absolutely unthinkable to Bill that they would stack the panel so that the one conservative was facing three "far left loons" (His words, not mine. Who knew that Catherine Crier was a far left loon?).

Now I’ve seen people outnumbered, but nothing like Tony Snow was on that program.

Um, hello??? Let me reacquaint Bill with the typical line up by pointing to the Sunday "news" shows, where just this past Sunday, only two of the nine guests over five shows were Democrats. So is Bill saying that the only fair programming is to have more conservatives lined up so that they can gang up on the token liberal? *snort* Bill, take a look at the FOXNews programming any day of the week. And let's not forget this report by Media Matters.

Bill brings on author Mark Smith who wins the award for the sheer, mindless ability to spew conservative tropes that have no passing relationship to reality:

And I think, by the way, that the Mark Cubans of the world and the Bill Mahers of the world under no circumstances will change their mind is they can’t afford to. I think the Democrats in America have no choice but to frankly, in many ways, cheer against America.

You need to have crisis and failure in America and overseas to justify more government, higher taxes, and the like. And I think that that’s why they’re so worried that George Bush will succeed in Iraq because if Bush succeeds, all arguments that they’ve been raising will frankly fall by the wayside.

Tired, Mark. Very, very tired. And exhibits the simple binary thought process of your average third grader. But kudos to you for reading Naomi Klein. Too bad you didn't understand a fraking word of it.

Yeah and I think it’s quite interesting Bill, how…and I think if you want to go back to the start of this, I think the fact that the left in America had decades and decades of a media monopoly and I think only now is the left trying to figure out how do they successfully compete in a marketplace of ideas where they no longer have the only voice. Where now they have to explain what they think and why they think it on Fox News, on the internet, on talk radio and the like, and I think they’re adjusting and adapting to that and I think they’re going through, frankly, some growing pains. Which is why we see the vitriolism [sic] that’s being sort of targeted to one another in a way that we haven’t seen in the past.

This is so completely non-reality based that even Bill calls out Smith for it. I mean, even Fox News viewers--incurious as studies have shown them to be--have enough functioning intellect to know that's a huge pile of bovine excrement.

I’ve been saying, if fact, in some ways, maybe the best argument to vote for a Republican, although I’m a conservative, the best argument to vote for a Republican may very well be that we’re not Democrats.

Wow. With all due respect to the man responsible for The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy 2006: The Arguments You Need to Defeat the Loony Left , I think I speak for more than a few when I say that I'm very grateful you're not on the team.