Culture11, we hardly knew ye. And what a true tragedy for us, that we failed to recognize such brilliance, a guiding star, a beacon to lead us back to the path of…of…well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? That the people busy trying to win elections just weren’t cool enough. Not enlightened enough? Or just too stuck on Sarah?

“One of my proudest moments,” Kuo told me, “was when someone at RedState”—the conservative blog that attempted to mount an online purge of the movement’s reformists in the last weeks of the campaign—”said, ‘We aren’t even going to post a link to Culture11.’ “

SRSLY? *THAT* was one of your proudest moments? Not when you “left the administration unhappily and went on to write Tempting Faith, the most personal of the dissenting White House memoirs of the Bush years”? Or was it when the money ran out and you surveyed all you had built for a mere $X million? Give me a freaking break. Here’s your gold star-embroidered hemp sweater for standing up to The Man.

Please. First, to get this out of the way: there was no official RedState policy of not linking to Culture11. Culture11 had quite a few defenders inside RedState and readers in our community – and to be more precise, several of the folks involved with Culture11 had quite a few fans. Many of us didn’t just defend the site, but rooted for its success. Some of us even got used as professional references when all those writers ended up on the street.

But at the same time, there were more than few folks at RedState that looked at the sneering attitudes like Kuo’s and frankly didn’t shed a tear when that bunch failed to cajole even an angel investor (and I use the term loosely in the absence of a identifiable business model) to continue throwing good money after bad. We weren’t sad that a bunch of folks who burned through a load of righty cash and ended up at the end with nothing but fawning praise from the left got a little lesson in how markets work.

And see, that was the problem all along. It’s not just that Culture11 didn’t know what they were really setting out to do. It’s that they weren’t very good at it.