Continued from “All May Not Be As It Seems For The Netroots, Vol. 1″.
We now know the stories of:
- Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and the DailyKos
- Jerome Armstrong and MyDD
- Armstrong Zuniga political consulting
- Possible blog-for-pay schemes at DailyKos and MyDD
As they said during “The X-Files”: The Truth Is Out There, and Trust No One.
At The New Republic (www.tnr.com), founded in 1914 as a supporter of the original progressive movement, Jason Zengerle asks:
Are Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (of the famous Daily Kos) engaged in a pay-for-play scheme in which politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant get the support of Kos?
Armstrong, Kos, and other big-time liberal bloggers have almost entirely ignored the issue, which is a bit surprising considering their tendency to rapidly respond to even the smallest criticism
Why the strange silence in the face of such damning allegations? Well, I think we now know the answer. It’s a deliberate strategy orchestrated by Kos. TNR obtained a missive Kos sent earlier this week to “Townhouse,” a private email list comprising elite liberal bloggers, including Jane Hamsher, Matt Stoller, and Christy Hardin Smith. And what was Kos’s message to this group that secretly plots strategy in the digital equivalent of a smoke-filled backroom? Stay mum! He wrote:
I am exploring legal options against some of the wingnut bloggers who are claiming I’m syphoning netroots money into consultants and my own pockets.So far, this story isn’t making the jump to the traditional media, and we shouldn’t do anything to help make that happen.
My request to you guys is that you ignore this for now. It would make my life easier if we can confine the story.
If any of us blog on this right now, we fuel the story. Let’s starve it of oxygen. And without the “he said, she said” element to the story, you know political journalists are paralyzed into inaction.
Thanks, markos
So far, Kos’s friends in the fiercely independent liberal blogosphere seem to have displayed a sheep-like obedience to his dictat.
Wow! Here we have Mr. Progressive himself, messiah of the Truth To Power comrades, telling his minions NOT to Crash The Gate. This is the same Markos Zuniga that penned a defensive post about him not being a gatekeeper for his blog. He’s asking people to buy into the concept of him not being a gatekeeper one moment, yet acting in precisely the manner of a news gatekeeper. Hypocrite, maybe?
He still does not answer the serious questions that have been raised about his relationship with Armstrong and whether there is some arrangement by which politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant then receive Kos’s support.
But Reverend Kos goes further in this post on June 22, 2006, regarding The New Republic’s questioning of a blog-for-pay scheme:
There was one big rule for this list, an important cog in the growing Vast Left Wing Conspiracy — everything discussed was off the record.
That was obviously violated today as the New Republic betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners; that it stands with the National Review and wingnutoshpere in their opposition to grassroots Democrats.
If they have evidence for those smears, then they have nothing to fear. But if they, say, recklessly invented all manners of illegal or unethical activities by me without bothering to see if they bore any basis in truth, then they’ll have plenty to worry about.
 |
Kos has proven himself to be extremely vindictive towards liberals who don’t toe the line, and he has an enormous blog. Given that, would it be a big surprise if there were liberal bloggers who were really worried about getting on the wrong side of a guy who can send or deny them endless fountains of traffic? Can he “command” his followers? To what extent? Is he in control of the progressive totalitarian groupthink?
Is there a Ko$ola Kontroversy? June 2006 has been a really bad month for the nutroots. You just can’t buy comedy like this. |
Now for my perspective. Do I want to see Kos go down? Well, yes and no.
I detest Liberals. With a passion. I believe their goals, including Reverend Moulitsas himself, to have a welfare, nanny, Socialist state. They believe that a primary government purpose is to take care of the populace, to provide for their every need, to solve all their problems, to make their decisions, and to insert itself into every aspect of the individual’s life. To them Big Brother is a good thing. And this I completely disagree with. Therefore I wish Kos, and his minions, would whither away and die, retiring to some French villa, never to be heard from again.
But no, in actuality I don’t want to see Kos go anywhere, and I don’t want him to be gound guilty of fraud. The world needs the Nutroots. We need to see exactly how wacky they are. We need to show the world exactly what will happen if we let our guard down for even a moment and allow the Left to take over. We need to see their vision of a One World Utopia where the individual loses his identity and is merely a member of a group. In my mind the center of the universe is not the government but rather the individual, and thet’s what should be protected at all costs.
Is Moulitsas guilty of “play for pay”? Maybe, maybe not. It would be sad if, after all his preaching of “no more government as usual”, “voice of the grassroots”, and “truth to power”, that he is found to be exhibiting the very same behaviors as those he’s railed against. If it’s true you can expect half of his minions to fade away while the other half falls into lockstep denial. If it’s not true, then I hope the ENTIRETY of the blogosphere remembers what almost happened here and make sure your message is pure and not tainted by outside influence …
… otherwise us in the New Media become just as worthless as the Old Media. And that would be a very sad day.
Markos, Moulitsas, Zúniga, DailyKos, Jerome Armstrong, MyDD, Zengerle, New Republic, Ko$ola
