"You forget who's got the knife"

Years ago, my husband and some co-workers were at one of those Japanese chef restaurants. One of my husband's co-workers was trying to be funny by insulting the chef, whom he saw as just a glorifed waiter, really. The chef put up with it for a while -- good sport, hahaha, and all that -- but finally he had had enough. The jokes ended when he said, pleasantly but meaningfully, "You forget who's got the knife!"
The professional Kewl Kid pundits in Washington are feeling the cold breath of irrelevance on their necks, given the success of Yearly Kos and all the attention now being paid to Markos and Jerome Armstrong and Jane Hamsher and Crashing the Gate.
So now they're trying to slap down the bloggers -- for example, the smear jobs on The New Republic yesterday and on Instapundit today.
But Atrios dishes it right back at them in a subtle post which sends a pretty direct message to the Kewl Kids -- and the message is, we know you better than you know us, so back off before we start spilling the beans on you:

. . . Generally, "political strategists" are quoted all of the time in the media, or have spots on cable news, and miraculously they never seem to have any clients. Or, more to the point, we are never told who their clients are. Perhaps they just stand on a soap box on the corner and announce their strategy to Washington pedestrians. Still, one assumes that they do have clients and that what they say is indirectly or directly motivated by that . . .

And he didn't make any jokes this time about blogger ethics panels.