At Daily Kos, lurxst comes right out and says what a lot of us have known for a very long time.

This has been digging at me for, oh, about 4 years now. I have been hesitant to express this thought, in comments sections and in discussion with other people about the Iraq quagmire for fear of, I don’t know, being called mean. Or, un-American. Or something.

Supporting the troops essentially means supporting the illegal war. It seems that us anti-war types have been doing all sorts of mental and philisophical gymnastics to try and work around this. What has emerged is a sort of low impact, mealy-mouthed common wisdom that is palatable to everyone but is ultimately going to allow us to stay in Iraq for years to come.

He’s a traitor, sure, but at least he’s not a liar and a hypocrite.

Daily Kos cites a poll of 1461 Iraqis taken by a “respected British marketing research firm” which proves the US is responsible for the violent deaths of more than a million Iraqis so far.

And Ray Drake, at Davids Medienkritik, cites German media reports of numbers of US anti-war demonstrators.

ARD Tagesschau, SZ and SPIEGEL ONLINE – “4,000 to 6,000” anti-war demonstrators
ZDF and Die Zeit – “About 10,000” anti-war demonstrators
TAZ – “Tens-of-thousands” of anti-war demonstrators
Die Welt – “50,000 anti-war demonstrators”
Die Presse (Austrian media site) – “Around 100,000 Americans marched against the war…”

Do I hear 200,000? 500,000? 1,000,000 anti-war demonstrators? Going once – going twice – sold!

One of Kos’s recommended diarists, a moonbat who signs himself as “Maccabee,” yesterday leaked a report on current US war preparations supposedly originating from the horse’s mouth.
It read:

I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth.

I asked her why she is telling me this.

Her answer was really amazing.

“I have become cynical only recently. I also don’t believe anyone will be able to stop this. Bush has become something of an Emperor. He will give the command, and cruise missiles will fly and aircraft will fly and people will die, and yet few of us here are really able to cobble together a great explanation of why this is a good idea. Of course many of us can give you the 4H Club lecture on democracy in the Mid East. But if you asked any of the flight officers whether they have a clear idea of what the goal of this strike is, your answer would sound like something out of a think tank policy paper. But it’s not like Kosovo or when we relieved the tsunami victims. There everyone could tell you in a sentence what we were here doing.”

“That’s what’s missing. A real sense of purpose. What’s missing is the answer to what the hell are we doing out here threatening this country with all this power? Last night in the galley, an ensign asked what right do we have to tell a sovereign nation that they can’t build a nuke. I mean the table got EF Hutton quiet. Not so much because the man was asking a question that was off culture. But that he was asking a good question. In fact, the discussion actually followed afterwards topside where someone in our group had to smoke a cigarette. The discussion was intelligent but also in lowered voices. It’s like we aren’t allowed to ask the questions that we always ask before combat. It’s almost as if the average seaman or soldier is doing all the policy work.”

The right side of the blogosphere got right to work on this one.

Confederate Yankee I Love the Smell of Daily Kos in the Morning.

Neptunus Lex Hoisting the (BS) Flag.

Joshua Trevino:

It’s no surprise that there are serial liars and embellishers on the interwebs. What should be noted is that their lies and embellishments can be utterly transparent and repetitive, and yet be accepted as fact time and again by the audience for whom they confirm basic prejudices. Take, for example, one pseudonymous fellow at DailyKos who goes by “Maccabee.” He claimed to meet a Romanian cabbie who told him to leave Bush’s tyrannical America; he claimed to meet a Holocaust survivor who told him that Bush’s America resembles Nazi Germany; he claimed to meet another cabbie, Ugandan this time, who told him that Bush’s America is worse than Idi Amin’s Uganda; he claimed to have received a phone call from Balad, Iraq, revealing that the majority of the American Army’s mechanized strength is “out of commission”; and today, he claimed to have received a telephone call from an American aircraft carrier on deployment, revealing that the United States Navy is about to attack Iran (This item has been deleted from Daily Kos -JDZ). Oh, and he also learned that the naval rank and file detest George W. Bush, too. That “Maccabee” is a habitual liar is obvious enough: what’s more ridiculous than his fables is that they are nearly always Recommended Diaries at DailyKos. The reality-based community loves its myths — and its mythmakers.

And so poor Kos discovered that real treason had not been posted after all, and he was forced to purge the offending post, to eat humble pie (see below), and to admonish all his little moonbats (in purest Kos-ese): Don’t believe everything you read on the internets.

Seriously, just because something online confirms your own viewpoint or prejudices or whatnot, it does not mean it’s true.

Skepticism is a virtue.

Now the right-wingers are laughing at the gullibility of those who recommend Maccabee’s diaries.

And they are quite justified in doing so.

New York Times:

Prominent liberal blogger Jerome Armstrong has agreed to pay nearly $30,000 in fines in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that Armstrong touted the stock of a software company on Raging Bull, an Internet bulletin board, in 2000, without disclosing that he was being paid to do so.

Armstrong, the co-author of “Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics,” with Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, and the founder of the Democratic activist site MyDD.com, consented to a civil penalty of $20,000, plus disgorgement of $5,832, and $3,235 in interest.

SEC litigation release.

Daily Kos headlines the story Good Riddance Attention Whore:

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

Evidently, Mrs. Sheehan found that all was not hugs and love inside the ranks of leftist political activism.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

And she isn’t getting enough appreciation or making any money.

I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others.I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings.

Kos, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga himself, the blogosphere’s favorite bolshie, is celebrating Halloween a little early this year, donning his “libertarian” costume, and penning the October lead essay on Cato Unbound.

It’s easy to understand why the powers-that-be at Cato let Kos in the door. The absolute incongruity of the idea, its cognitive dissonance, makes perfect journalistic sense. “Kos the libertarian” is arrant nonsense, but will inevitably arouse curiousity and attract readers in the same way National Inquirer headlines about flying saucers returning Elvis to proclaim the Second Coming of Princess Di will sell.

Hell, I even read it.

Of course, I was disappointed. Kos never writes brilliantly, and all he’s doing here is a not very impressive intellectual version of three card monte.

“It’s not the government that’s the real threat any longer. It’s the big corporations.” “The free market is the answer. But we need the government to build the marketplace, the roads, the courts… and the Tennessee Valley Authority, and to license hypertrichologists to make all that free market capitalism possible, and not ruinous.”

Kos is just selling the same old statist wine in bottles he has labelled “The New Libertarian Democrat.”

All this great new idea represents is one more galvanic twitch from the dying leftwing statism of the last century desperately trying to cling to existence a little longer by impersonating a more highly evolved political idea.

I do not believe this manuever will succeed. Nature has equipped the political competition with more than adequately keen perceptions to detect Kos’s fraud.

Daily Kos ran a poll on the UK Airline Terrorism Plot, which produced these results:

The thwarted U.K. plot

1. was legit. 792 votes – 49 %
2. was more drama from BushCo to keep us all afraid. 811 votes – 50 %

1603 Total Votes

————————————-

The frightening thing is that they do really let all these impaired people vote.

In François Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim (1962), the lives of two Bohemian male friends, one French, one Austrian (played by Henri Serre and Oskar Werner), in pre-WWI Paris are changed forever by their making the acquaintance of the fascinating and mercurial Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Catherine is a kind of Anima, a force of Nature, a far stronger and more interesting personality than either of the pair, and she easily dominates one after another in turn, until Jim attempts to rebel. Catherine then responds by luring Jim into an automobile, and driving (with him in the car) straight off a bridge.

The democrat party is a lot like Jules and Jim: ineffectual and harmless in itself, but fundamentally allied to, and (in a way) in love with an activist radical left, which it cannot do without, cannot possibly control, and which (like Catherine) is not very nice underneath it all, and (like Catherine) dangerously mad.

Much of the democrat base is made up of people (like Catherine), who carry around a personal bottle of vitriol (“for lying eyes”), who are capable of turning mercilessly upon those closest to themselves (even those whom they have very recently supported for Vice President).

And (like Catherine), too, the democrat base’s madness has every likelihood of always, and inevitably, ending in (electoral) suicide.

One pictures Hillary Clinton walking out of the cemetery after installing the ashes of Joe Lieberman’s democrat party career in the niche, marching off sadly (like Jules). But, in this case, though Catherine may have committed suicide, she cannot herself die, and will get to commit suicide again and again.

Kos made FoxNews.com yesterday, with Noel Shepherd wondering: Is the Daily Kos About to Implode?

It appears that the post-Yearly Kos month from hell is continuing for Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of the Internet’s premier liberal blog Daily Kos. After receiving some extremely negative press from major publications such as The New York Times, The New Republic and Newsweek immediately following his seemingly successful bloggers’ convention in Las Vegas, Kos is now faced with an even greater challenge: dissension within his ranks.

Such internal squabbling comes at the same time that many prominent Democrats seem to be privately expressing concern about the direction the “netroots” — the self-described Internet grassroots movement of liberal bloggers and their loyal followers — are taking the Party. This seemingly inconvenient planetary alignment is not only threatening the long-term viability of this crusade, but also is putting Kos in an uncomfortable position just as his notoriety is skyrocketing.

As reported here on June 30, revelations about Kos’s friend and former business partner Jerome Armstrong — from stock fraud allegations to accepting consulting fees from not so liberal candidates — have cast a cloud over the blog and its leader. This pall has also undermined the stellar relationship Kos has had with the traditional media up to this point.

Yet, maybe more important, these revelations — along with the way Markos and his Kossacks reacted to them — have caused some prominent DKos bloggers to question the behavior of Zuniga and his devotees. Such a civil war within the liberal blogosphere certainly has the potential to further discredit it, while likely making the mainstream media as well as the candidates they revere less apt to associate with this developing train wreck.

Some prominent bloggers on the left have even begun to criticize Kos. Last Saturday, KosKid Maryscott O’Connor, in a posting titled Something is Rotten in Blogmark, condemned the customary Partyline mentality which flourishes on Daily Kos:

Sometimes I am embarrassed to call myself a member of DKos.

This is one of those times.

There is a sort of groupthink, Lord of the Flies kind of behaviour at DKos over certain issues that absolutely makes me nauseated…

Increasingly, I have begun to feel intimidated or wary about writing my thoughts and doubts about these issues, lest I be set upon by a pack of Defenders of the Kos. It is this sense of intimidation that spurs me to write this, among other reasons: when I start censoring myself because I’m afraid I’ll be punished with disapproval, anyone’s disapproval, I know I’m allowing others’ opinions to matter too much to me. I shouldn’t be deciding what to say and not to say online based on any anticipated reaction.

And predicted that not even the left blogosphere’s chorus of howler-monkeys can ultimately succeed in shouting down questions about the exchange of the Kos’ influence for cash. The Kosola scandal “WILL NOT GO AWAY simply because some people don’t think Markos should be held to the standards that he WILL, ultimately, BE held to.”

But many on the left, like Steve Gilliard, think lefties should

“Say nothing bad about Commander Kos.”

They’re scurrying to the barricades over on DailyKos today, posting defensively about the media’s “obsession with trying to bring down the progressive netroots.”

Mr. Siegel’s criticism was, needless to say, not well received, and the moonbats (in their customary fashion) howled abuse and hurled dung.

In today’s continuation of the exchange of fire between New Republic and DailyKos, Lee Siegel attributes the creation of the objectionable aspects of the culture of the left-side blogosphere (the constant usage of obscenity, the readiness to resort to intimidation) to the personality and philosophy of Kos himself:

“Moron”; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a “conservative.” Another resourceful adversarialist invited me to lick his scrotum. Please send a picture and a short essay describing your favorite hobbies. One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door–I’m too polite to mention any names–even asked who it was at TNR who gave me “the keys to a blog.”

All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” The proof, you might say, is in the puddingheads.

I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. Conscientiously criticize, in the form of a real argument, blogospheric favorites like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the response isn’t similar criticism, done conscientiously and in the form of an argument, but insults, personal attacks, and even threats. This truly is the stuff of thuggery and fascism.

Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.

In a 2004 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga told a reporter that he moved to El Salvador in the late 1970s with his family–one of his parents is Salvadoran–who apparently had financial interests there. The article relates:

“I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.”

He remembers bullets flying in the marketplace and watching on television as government soldiers executed guerrillas. He also remembers watching footage of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

He was 9, and he asked his father what that was all about. His father, a furniture salesman, said, “It’s just politics.”

The future blogger said, “Tell me all about it.”
So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that. I wonder, does Zuniga consider the Solidarity movement disgusting, compromising, venal politics, too? And was there really no one to root for during the Salvadoran civil war? It’s hard to believe the usually inflexibly partisan Zuniga actually said that. The rebels may have been “Maoist”–whatever that meant to them in Central America at the time–but their goal of overthrowing a brutal, rapacious regime might well be something that a passionate political idealist and reformer like Zuniga, looking back at it in 2004, would sympathize with. Or so you would think.

But, then, Zuniga–let’s cut the puerile nicknames of “DailyKos, “Atrios,” “Instapundit” et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity–believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it’s hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.

He told Deborah Solomon in The New York Times that he joined the army out of high school to build up his self-confidence. Elsewhere, he has spoken of his love of 25-mile marches with a heavy knapsack. After the Army, college and then law school. But he never practiced law, it seems. He drifted to San Francisco and into the high-tech industry, where he designed Websites. Finally, he ended up in politics, again drifting into the Democratic party, supporting first John Edwards, and then Wesley Clark, and then, as a paid consultant, Howard Dean.

It wasn’t long after that when Zuniga began channeling other people’s rage.

Lee Siegel yesterday harshly criticized many left blogs’ more-than-shrill reaction to the New Republic‘s suggestion that left-blog influence may be being traded for cash, and its revelation at the same time of the existence of systematic backroom coordination of news coverage, via “Townhouse,” a secret email list connecting the elite of leftwing blogging.

Siegel was deservedly scathing in his comments about the character and quality of the dialogue found on many of the most influential left-side blogs.

In response to Jason Zengerle’s most recent post on The Plank–“Hope you’re not tired of this Kos stuff”–no, I for one am definitely not tired of Zengerle’s artful and honest exposure of someone who, more and more, seems to represent the purest, most classical strain of hypocrisy. All the MSM has to do is reach out and touch the angriest, most vitriolic blogger, and he or she melts like butter on the beach….

..when bloggers do get the MSM to turn its head their way, the training wheels come off and they usually fall flat on their faces.

It’s a bizarre phenomenon, the blogosphere. It radiates democracy’s dream of full participation but practices democracy’s nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction. It’s hard fascism with a Microsoft face. It puts some people, like me, in the equally bizarre position of wanting desperately for Joe Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont so that true liberal values might, maybe, possibly prevail, yet at the same time wanting Lamont, the hero of the blogosphere, to lose so that the fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman might be defeated. (Every critical event in democracy is symbolic of the problem with democracy.)

Even beyond the thuggishness, what I despise about so many blogurus, is the frivolity of their “readers.” DailyKos might have hundreds of responses to his posts, but after five or six of them the interminable thread meanders into trivial subjects that have nothing to do with the subject that briefly provoked it. The blogosphere’s lack of concentration is even more dangerous than all its rage. In the Middle East, they struggle with belief. In the United States, we struggle with attention. The blogosphere’s fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus.

This week has been a very interesting week for me. And I know I have sort of arrived in a scary way, because now I’m not being attacked for what I’ve said and done. People are making stuff up about me now. They’re inventing things. And so I know now I’m on a different plane.

But this is the world we live in. There are people who have a vested interest in the status quo. There are people who don’t want to see things change because they’re not used to things changing. They know the world. It’s comfortable. It’s cozy. If they read the media, the media’s not going to tell them what we’re all about. Howard Dean thought we were all young. I’m not sure where he got that, because he should have known better. Hillary Clinton came up and she quoted the netroots based on something a conservative said. They need to live it for themselves. They need to become part of it, because this is an integral part of American politics now, and that’s not going to change.

And the beauty of it is at the end of the day, they can take me down. They can take Jerome Armstrong down. They can take down Atrios. They can take down any of the so-called leaders in the movement and it doesn’t matter, because this is not a leaderless movement. I used to say this was a leaderless movement, and I was wrong. It’s not a leaderless movement; it’s a everybody-who’s-part-of-it-is-a-leader. And so you can take any single individual down, and it will continue to live on.

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