I've gotten a wry satisfaction out of reading the accounts of AOL's purchase of the Huffington Post; incidentally for much too high a price by the estimations of most analysts.

The Huffington Post may have been founded as the liberal answer to the conservative Drudge Report, a place for progressive wound-licking in the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election.

But on Monday, Arianna Huffington was distancing herself from the lefty label as she announced the sale of HuffPost to AOL for $315 million.

“We don’t see ourselves as left,” she told POLITICO. “And I think it’s one area where news consumers are ahead of the media, because they know that continuing to see everything that’s happening as a right-left issue is missing what’s happening, and is also making it much harder for us to be properly informed.”

Some on the left worry that the sale to AOL could mean an end to HuffPost in its current incarnation — away from its roots in the progressive community, which were its first bloggers, commenters and readers, and toward a more middle-of-the-road posture, to make it more broadly appealing.

When I first heard about it, I immediately wondered how all the early staffers and bloggers would feel about this, especially in light of the fact THAT THEY DIDN'T GET PAID. It was too perfect, a complete validation of what I've been saying about the left for years. To reiterate: the left is constituted of dysfunctional, angry people and those that know how to exploit dysfunctional, angry people.

In the online world, few media entrepreneurs have been as savvy as Arianna Huffington. And while it may take a while, the HuffPo deal will serve as a powerful consolidation of progressive media operations in the increasingly digital news industry. What's especially interesting about this is Arianna's the ultimate personification of the left's hypocritical socialist elite. Not only do progressives like Arianna love money --- lots of it --- they love telling other people what they should do with theirs. When the Mayhill Fowler story broke in 2008 --- Fowler first reported Barack Obama's "clinging to their guns and religion" comments at a ritzy San Francisco fundraiser --- Huffington was vacationing on a yacht in Tahiti. Progressive eviscerated Mayhill Fowler for her reporting, especially since the media's establishment Obama-enablers would have bottled up that juicy "clinging" tidbit.

In spite of Arianna's windfall (turning a million dollar investment into 100+ million in just five years), much of the professional left, all of them wannabe Ariannas, are making cooing noises about the move, no doubt hoping there's a possible journalistic sinecure in it for them, or choosing to believe that left-wing ideas 'sell'. which of course explains why the Huffpo has chosen to follow the Sun's business model, including the famous page 3 girls--because the left's ideas don't sell, but sex does.

If you're in a poker game and you don't know who the patsy is; you're the patsy.