Dept. of Let's Not Start Sucking Each Other's Dicks Quite Yet.

Big wingnut news of the morning is the purchase of Hot Air by Salem Communications.

This will be greeted as a Very Smart Decision by the usual suspects, but it's instructive to consider Salem's last acquisition, made four months before the 2006 midterm elections:

On July 4, Salem Communications, one of the country’s largest radio-station owners, will relaunch an old Web war horse called Townhall.com as a hub for its stable of stars (including Bill Bennett, Michael Medved and [Hugh] Hewitt himself). The hope? That “Web 2.0″ wherewithal can transform what was once an op-ed clearinghouse into a single nerve center serving the separate conservative communities of talk radio and the Internet. To Hewitt, a valuable White House ally, the math is simple: add 6 million Salem fans to Townhall’s 1.4 million unique monthly visitors and you’ve got an audience six or seven times the size of liberal site Daily Kos, the Web’s biggest political blog. “We will overwhelm them,” he says.

Ahem. Four years later, Hewitt remains as wrong as ever.

I hope this new venture enjoys similar success.