An interesting pair of events spotlight the difference between rightwing talk radio and leftwing talk radio this week, and suggest why one is smashingly successful and the other is still amateur hour, 3-1/2 years after the founding of Air America:

• Randi Rhodes, Air America host, found herself face down in a gutter in front of an Irish bar in New York City, bruised and disoriented. Normally, this is not the kind of mystery that would take a whole hour of Law and Order to solve. Indeed, few of us got through college without something similar happening; we try not to keep doing it in middle age, however.

But goofs at Air America promptly made it into a great conspiracy. Rhodes apparently reported the stumble as a mugging at first; and one of her colleagues, one Jon Elliott, apparently having never heard the ancient proverb "When foot is in crosshairs, stop pulling trigger," raced to the air to declare Rhodes' fall further evidence that we live in Amerikkka in 1933:

Is this an attempt by the right wing hate machine to silence one of our own? Are we threatening them? Are they afraid that we're winning? Are they trying to silence and intimidate us?

Soon all the usual spots-- the Air America forums, Kos, Democratic Underground, etc.-- were buzzing with conspiracy theories:

IF this was a political hit from Blackwater or whoever, there is going to be the wrath of G-d on the perpetrators.

Adolph Hitler's right wing thugs regularly 'mugged' opponents and members of unpopular groups even before he came to power....Given Randi Rhodes courageous outspokenness about the sinister intentions of the right wing, it is not unreasonable to suspect that this non-robbery assault is an attempt by Neo-conservative thugs to silence her views.

What frequency is that, Kenneth? Alas for those whose sense of personal drama is fed by imagining that they live in the darkest and thus coolest of times, a day or two later Rhodes sheepishly admitted that, uh, she'd just tumbled down by herself in front of an Irish bar for unknown reasons. Rightwing bloggers have had fun ever since mocking the overwrought reaction to her accident. Are they trying to silence you, Jon Elliott? No, because you provide too much juicy material.

• Congress tackled a really important issue the other day: it wrote a private company suggesting that it needed to shut up one of its employees. The employee was one Rush Limbaugh, a popular talkradio host of the right, and the reason Democrats in Congress swerved across eight lanes of the First Amendment to try to silence him was to try to create an equivalent in public outrage to the "General Betray Us" ad placed in the New York Times (at illegal bargain rates) by MoveOn.org.

The premise was that Limbaugh had slandered our soldiers!!!! What had he done, quoted Dick Durbin or John Kerry verbatim? No, he'd referred specifically to one Jesse Macbeth, currently being prosecuted for posing as an Iraq veteran, as a "phony soldier"-- which in fact he was, in the sense that he claimed to have committed atrocities in Iraq when in fact he was discharged before completing basic training. But Media Matters, a nonpartisan watchdog group which watches the rightwing media for Hillary Clinton all day long, sliced and diced Limbaugh's actual quote to try to make it look like he'd been indiscriminate in using the term.

This would have been a pretty easy thing for Limbaugh to refute under the circumstances, but showmanship isn't being on the defensive, it's taking it to another level-- and Limbaugh, realizing that he had in his possession a letter containing the signatures of three possible next presidents of the United States, among many other luminaries, in the act of trying to shut up a private citizen, decided to auction it off as a fundraiser for the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Fund, a scholarship fund for children of soldiers and police officers killed in the line of duty. The auction, which ends later today, is now at over $2 million for the letter, an amount Limbaugh pledges to match.

I realize there are many whose gorges rise at the mere mention of Limbaugh, and I am no fan of the entire genre of talkradio ranting, but if one can overcome one's partisan feelings and merely admire how the game is played, this is brilliant showmanship on every level-- down to the Hallburton briefcase the letter is kept in. It embarasses his opponents, it makes them a party to reinforcing his claim that he is a stalwart supporter of the troops, and it just demonstrates such brio, such swashbuckling panache, in how one responds to one's enemies. Progressive radio will never emerge from the dank basement of conspiracy mutterings and appeal to a broad audience until it too can project this kind of sunny gusto for the fight, the kind that projects inner confidence and the joy of the thing well done. The first step in avoiding falling on your face is to raise your sights.

Tsongas vs. Ogonowski-- until yesterday most of us would have assumed that this was the straight to video sequel to Ballistic: Eck Vs. Sever. If you follow political news, however, you know that it's the race that a bored press is avidly studying the entrails of, trying to determine if it holds any significance for 2008.

Basically, the debate falls into two camps:

1) Mild significance. (It's so slow for news even that qualifies as news.) Ogonowski, whose brother died as a pilot on a 9/11 plane, did surprisingly well for a Republican in Massachusetts, narrowly losing; Tsongas, whose late husband Paul was a senator for a couple of millennia from the state, did surprisingly poorly, narrowly winning. This suggests that all Republicans are not doomed in 2008, each race is its own race and their message and their better candidates have some traction when divorced from an unpopular president.

2) No significance. The Dem state machine did the next best thing to putting up Tsongas' corpse for reelection and still pulled off a win, which just proves that old hacks shouldn't be allowed to pick weak candidates, but even if they do, it's a Dem sweep in the making.

Coming from Illinois, where we follow Machine orders religiously and thus voted in the closest thing to a corpse (the stroke-enfeebled John Stroger) so Mayor Daley could then replace him with his son Todd Stroger (who came pretty feeble to start with), I tend to agree with #1. In the battle of the dead relatives for office, Ogonowski & brother did suprisingly well against Tsongas and husband and the machine, suggesting that Dems should not take '08 for granted and Repubs should not be laying in supplies of sleeping pills and razor blades-- yet.

Still, one can't draw more than the tiniest of conclusions from such an unusual race. I mean, a state election is one thing, but it's not like the Democrats, faced with a candidate with a 9/11 connection, would nominate for president some ex-officeholder's wife with little track record besides standing next to her husband and smiling, right?