One of the most sane and sage voices in either the left or right political blogosphere has passed away. Steve Gilliard of The News Blog lost his long fight with heart disease. He was 41. He’d been hospitalized for quite awhile, and his condition had taken a marked turn for the worse over the past few weeks.

To say that his voice will be missed is an understatement of epic proportions. Steve could cut throught the bullshit like a hot knife through whipped Rovian butter. He took crap from no one, even when his articles generated a certain level of controversy (and his best writing did just that, on both the left and the right).

I discovered Gilly about the same time I started blogging. In fact, the link in ASZ’s blogroll is to the older version of News Blog, and it’s been there since we started. I’m not even sure that he knew who I was - I’d comment infrequently over there, and linked back to him on many, many occasions. He only responded to me once or twice, and rarely linked back to ASZ, but that never bothered me (or surprised me) because he was one of the Alpha dogs of the blog world.

Gilliard was an original on par with Billmon, and arguably the leading African American progressive blogger. Interestingly enough, Gilly got his blogging start at the same shop as Billmon - frontpaging at Daily Kos before starting up his own show. He was an inspriation to many of us “second generation” progressive political bloggers, and I’ll always regret never having had the opportunity to meet him in person, even though I feel like I knew him well.

His struggle is over, but ours is not. I think the best way that any of us can honor the memory of Steve Gilliard is to keep pushing those political boulders up the hill, when doing so seems a Sisyphusian task, and adopt his personal motto: “We Fight Back”.

And to Gilly, where ever you may be: thanks, man. You made a difference. You taught us well and made us think. That’s way beyond what most of us can hope to do in this mortal coil.

Ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing
wherewith we fly to heaven.

- William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Update: Kevin Hayden at American Street has a powerfully good eulogy of Gilliard, along with many links to other wonderful rememberences.