On Tuesday Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos, the most
trafficked blog on the web, attacked me personally and erroneously
for having written a column in the Union Leader (Manchester,
NH) in which I defended New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation
primary. “The author is a Republican, and a consultant. He stands
to lose lots of cash if NH loses its leading role,” he wrote of me in his
weblog.
Also on Tuesday the former Director of Internet Organizing for
Dean for President, Zephyr Teachout, revealed that the selfsame Markos Moulitsas
Zúniga (who goes by the handle “Kos”) had been a paid shill
for the Dean campaign, accepting fees for promoting the campaign of
the angry little ex-Governor of Vermont on his blog. Oh yeah,
Zúniga also gave “advice” to the campaign.
A very interesting revelation for a guy who wrote after the
Armstrong Williams pay-for-advocacy scandal broke, “we can assume
every conservative pundit is on the White House’s payola rolls,”
and accuses the “so-called” liberal media of being “outright shills
for the Bush administration.”
You could say I feel vindicated. (For the record, Kos claims to
have disclosed his relationship with the Dean campaign, but that
must be news to Dean’s former Democrat rivals, all of whom linked
up to Kos in their perfect ignorance, even while Kos was
campaigning for Dean.)
This mini-scandal is, probably, the blog equivalent of
Rathergate or the Williams scandal. As the busiest blog on the web,
the Daily Kos receives about a quarter of a million unique “hits”
every day. It’s the closest thing we in the blogosphere have to the
New York Times, both in volume of readership and absurdity
of content.
But this isn’t really about Markos Moulitsas Zúniga,
whose sphere of influence never extended beyond the “Bush is
Hitler” crowd. It’s about Howard Dean, the sneaky little subversive
who now wants to lead the Democrat National Committee out of the
wilderness.
A whole new round of unanswered questions ought to anchor Dean’s
ascent to the DNC Chairmanship now. Questions like: Was Dean paying
him when Kos wrote this little cutie in early April about contract
workers who were murdered in Fallujah:
That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries
[sic]. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are
there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are
there to wage war for profit. Screw them.
How about when Kos said John Kerry and his campaign team “should
be lined up and shot”? Does Dean endorse Kos’s use of the phrase
“racists thugs” to describe his rivals in the blogosphere? Does
Dean support Kos’s conspiracy theory that the “neocons” have a
secret plan to prolong the terror war by strengthening al Qaeda,
expressed thusly:
The lesson (of Berg’s murder) is that not finishing the
job in Afghanistan and invading Iraq with no good rationale gave Al
Qaida and similar groups time to catch their breath, reorganize,
and direct their efforts against a conveniently near target —
Iraq. This is the neocon “flypaper” theory in all its glory. It’s
working. The neocons WANTED it this way. And they got it.
Congratulations.
Or what about Kos’s expressed belief that George W. Bush is
responsible for the beheading of Nick Berg:
The prison abuse didn’t cause Berg’s horrific murder.
Bush’s (inept) War, in all its glory, did. The Neocon agenda, in
all its folly, did. The war cheerleaders now trying to use this for
propaganda purposes, in all their idiocy, did. Congrats. Your war
spirals ever out of control. Good luck trying to wash the blood out
of your hands.
Moreover, in the interest of full disclosure, shouldn’t someone
ask Howard Dean if Kos is still shilling for him now that Dean is a
candidate for DNC Chair? Kos claims to have folded his consulting
outfit, but let’s just say his credibility is shot.
Lest this seem like too much guilt by association, consider that
as chairman of the Democrat Nation Committee, Howard Dean would be
given the authority to hire scores of employees, consultants, and
advisers to rebuild his party and combat the Republicans. The
hiring of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga shows Dean has neither the
judgment nor the temperament to fill those positions
responsibly.
