We’ve lost a fighter.  Steve Gilliard was someone I admired immensely and read daily, and when he fell ill this time, and I read about the difficulty he was having in the hospital, I was afraid it would come to this.  I am going to miss his passionate, angry, righteous voice more then I want to think about right now.

He began as a frequent commenter on Daily Kos…

When reporters ask me when I first started thinking Daily Kos would become something more important, I tell them about the Dean campaign, or about the traffic explosion during the run-up and start of the Iraq War.

But that’s pretty much bullshit. Because the reality is much more mundane, much less sexy —

It was the arrival on the site’s comment boards of two people — Meteor Blades and Steve Gilliard.

They were a real revelation to me — I couldn’t believe that people like them, so brilliant, so insightful, so talented, would spend time at my little corner of the world. They inspired me to keep writing, keep building this place. Because if nothing else, I needed to make sure they had a platform upon which to speak.

So they ended up being two of the first contributing editors on Daily Kos. Steve, in fact, was the first person I ever approached with the "guest blogger" offer. And he didn’t waste time getting started, drawing on history of the region and the British occupation of Iraq in the late 1910s to set the stage for what the US would soon face in Iraq. He was frighteningly prescient on Iraq, and it wasn’t the only topic he would consistently nail. He was a credit to the progressive blogosphere.

Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage. And he got it with the News Blog, which he soon built into a full-time gig, still a rarity among bloggers. It was one of three sites I religiously checked more than three times a day.

If you knew Steve only from his blog, you’d think he was a pit bull. He was blunt, loud, aggressive, unafraid, and took no prisoners.

But you’d meet him in life, and he was the exact opposite. He was soft-spoken, shy, modest, calm, friendly, and — this was the most surprising to me — gentle.

I never would’ve gotten that from his writings. But that’s what he was.

I’d known Steve five years — just about my entire blogging existence. I don’t know of a blogging life without him. He has been a friend, a confidant, a sounding board, a reality check, a loyal ally, a mentor. He was family.

And while that all came to an end Saturday morning, I’m still not ready to let it go.

We were blessed to have Steve as long we did. But I’m selfish. I wanted much, much more.

Me too.  Pam at Pam’s House Blend has this…

I went a couple of rounds with Steve a few years back, mostly ribbing during one of the earlier rounds of blogger wars (the "pie fight" drama). More often than not though, over the last two years, we agreed on quite a bit, including our disdain for the religious right and the outlandish transparent efforts by the GOP to promote the candidacies of sell-out, fundie kissing house negroes like Ken Blackwell as proof of the party’s "outreach" to the black community.

We corresponded every once in a while, mostly  of the "can you believe this sh*t?" nature regarding the above. Steve enthusiastically came to my defense  back in February when The Peter and CWA launched their email disinformation campaign to discredit me (and attempt jeopardize my day job) by calling me "anti-Christian." Steve emailed and said:

You need to call these people out as racists and homophobes.

They think you’re going to care what they think. Tell them that you don’t need a bunch of racists lecturing you on the black church or anything else. That their rampant homophobia also disqualifies them. And then add in that they have no respect for lesbians or blacks anyway, besides hiring tokens.

As far as anti-Christian, unless you grew up in a far different family than mine, you know about the church and the one you grew up in was not filled with hateful screeds like this.

Steve was a fighter.  He knew that when the gutter takes a swing at you, you have to swing back, and hard and keep on swinging until they crawl back to wherever they came from.  None of this, faux civility crap when it came to dealing with the gutter.  Steve told it like it was, said it like it needed to be said, and never, Never conceded so much as an inch of the moral high ground to posturing republican thugs.  He knew his history…God how he knew his history…and he could relate the past to the present with breathtaking precision and insight.  Kos is right about how prescient he was on Iraq.  He saw with clarity how the imperialist impulse, and that relentless blindness to the lives and humanity of non-westerners, the arrogance and conceit of white superiority, still lives on and moves the hard right.  He understood it.  He understood how it informs the history we are living today.  And he never shrank from calling it for what it was, just as he never thought twice about calling out democratic party sell-outs, or those black leaders and ministers who think they can make a deal with the right for their own personal glory.  He always called it for what it was, no matter how impolitic.

We need more like him nowadays, not less.  And now he’s gone.  Damn.  Damn! 

You were an honest, righteous, decent voice.  You fought the good fight.  You’re going to be missed.   I’m not sure I’m going to be able to bear taking your link down.