HERE’S A TRANSCRIPT of Hugh Hewitt’s defense of blogs from a full-bore Bill O’Reilly attack.

UPDATE: Ed Cone says that Hewitt and O’Reilly misstated what was going on with the Kos/Teachout affair. I think he’s right, though it’s surprisingly hard to be nuanced on TV (and especially on O’Reilly’s show in my experience.) As I’ve said before, though, I think that what’s really interesting is what was going on in the Dean Campaign’s thinking, not what was going on with Kos.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has more. When was I on O’Reilly? Back in 2000 (yes, before InstaPundit). He let me get about three words in edgewise once he saw that I wasn’t going where he wanted me to (basically, he wanted me to say that the Clinton Administration was the most unethical in history, bar none), which mystified me since I’d had long conversations with his producer and sent them a copy of the ethics book that the appearance was about. The book isn’t exactly a robust defense of Clinton, but Lanny Davis has used it as a classroom text, so it’s not exactly red-meat Clinton-bashing either.

MORE: Chris Suellentrop has an interesting piece on the Kos/Teachout affair over at Slate. One quibble: He says that some people call Kos a “liberal InstaPundit.” That’s true, people do, but as I wrote here, it’s not really an apt analogy. Kos is a political activist, while I didn’t even get invited to the inauguration (nor would I have gone if I had; I was invited to stuff at Clinton’s first inaugural and didn’t go even though I was single and living in Charlottesville at the time, just an hour or two away — that stuff just bores me).

STILL MORE: Bill Quick weighs in, on Kos’s side. Meanwhile, in an update to this post, Hugh Hewitt responds to Ed Cone’s criticisms.