The Wonderful World of Kos
Lots of buzz (just check out Memeorandum) over this Washington Monthly profile of our ol’ buddy Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Some highlights and lowlights:
The site, which has existed for only around three and a half years, now has 3.7 million readers each week. That’s more than the top 10 opinion magazines—of both left and right—combined, more readers than any political publication has had, ever, in the history of the world.
Psbbbbtt! Patently false; 3.7 million visitors a week is not really 3.7 million visitors, as anyone familiar with a sitemeter knows (it is impressive, don’t get me wrong). The real number of daily visitors to Kos has been estimated (granted, a year ago, and his traffic has grown since then) at roughly 25-30,000. Many of those people visit every day – in fact, most. To estimate that more than 100,000 people read Kos weekly, then, is probably off the mark.
“Everybody says I’m an a**hole, and they’re right, I am,” Moulitsas says. …[W]hen the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee threw a party for him and some other bloggers at last year’s Boston convention, he arrived, immediately picked a loud, disruptive fight with the organization’s executive director, Jim Bonham, and stormed out.
Ever the charmer, eh?
The myth of Karl Rove, which looms over American politics, and the conviction that the party’s wins or losses are a matter of tactics, not substance, has left the Democrats looking for their own master tactician. And some in the party seem to want to see Moulitsas in that role.
And may I say, more than a few Republicans (oh, please, please, PLEASE give Markos more of a role in the Democratic Party!).
…[I]n 1998, [Markos] moved out to San Francisco to try his luck in Silicon Valley. A couple of years later, now married, he moved again, to Berkeley, exasperated at the realization that he wasn’t going to make a fortune in the high-tech boom. “Maybe at some time, Silicon Valley really was this democratic ideal where the guy with the best idea made a billion dollars, but by the time I got there at least, it was just like anything else—a bunch of rich kids who knew each other running around and it all depended on who you knew,” Moulitsas told me. Unemployed, Moulitsas, started posting comments on a site called MyDD.com, the most insidery of the emerging liberal blogs. During late 2001 and early 2002, he developed a following, for the strength and clarity of his denunciations of the Bush administration. Moulitsas started his own blog, and, in the summer of 2002, Daily Kos opened for business.
Strength and clarity – oh, yeah, sure, that’s right. Hilarious that Markos thinks Silicon Valley was shut down by 1998 – the very height of the tech boom! Couldn’t have anything to do with his own shortcomings, of course…
There was another reason, though, why hundreds of thousands of liberals around the country found themselves addictively checking and rechecking Daily Kos as the 2004 election approached. It made them think Democrats were going to win. Moulitsas wasn’t just posting any polls, he was selecting those that suggested Democrats—from John Kerry to congressional candidates—were heading for victory, while downplaying less encouraging signs. It left liberals trapped in a bubble of reassurance. Heading into the election, it would have been reasonable to assume from the evidence presented on Daily Kos that Kerry was the clear favorite to beat Bush, and that Democrats were likely to pick up seats in both houses of Congress. When none of these things happened, there was a sense of incomprehension. All of Kos’s confident predictions had been wrong. “It’s a valid criticism. Looking back, I was too optimistic,” Moulitsas told me. “[At] the beginning, I didn’t even know what a margin of error was.”
Yes, the bubble…Kos, Democratic Underground, Huff’n'Puff – they all share the same function (as, to be fair, do some sites on the right) – to reinforce the views of the already converted, opposing viewpoints be damned!
And speaking of damned – we’ve saved the worst for last:
The site is for the true believers, not the aesthetes; its tone is harsh, impassioned, and frequently humorless.
And sometimes infantile and absurd. The site in recent months has become to seem like the site of some arcane political Thermidor with puzzled liberals being endlessly impaled upon pikes. In June 2003, after television cameras caught a cheering, thousand-strong mob in Fallujah dragging the charred, dismembered bodies of American contractors through the streets, Moulitsas linked to the reports and said of the contractors: “I feel nothing… Screw them.” The declaration, gleefully seized on by right-wing bloggers, provoked weeks of controversy. Democratic candidates came under pressure to pull their advertisements from the site, and even Moulitsas’s traditional allies in the liberal blogosphere—including The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum—criticized him. (When I asked Moulitsas recently how he felt about the episode, his mouth stretched into a smile: “Vindicated,” he said…)
Let’s summarize: when asked about his infamous “I feel nothing…Screw them” comment, regarding the bodies of Americans dragged through the streets of Fallujah, Markos smiled and said he feels vindicated.
Sometimes only the plain truth will do: Markos, you are indeed an a**hole, but son, it’s nothing to brag about. You had better hope the concept of karma is a myth…
UPDATE 8:38 p.m.: Many thanks to Ace for the link…
UPDATE 2 10:39 p.m.: Thanks also to Charles at LGF, Leon H. at Red State, Gateway Pundit, Lorie Byrd, Betsy Newmark, James Joyner, The Political Teen, and Kevin Aylward of Wizbang…
UPDATE 3 10:57 pm.: A quick note about the vindicated quote: a commenter at Red State notes that the elipses I put in left out the following:
The media has recently begun to question the role of American contractors in Iraq, he pointed out, which was the point all along. This is how a liberal noise machine, freed from the don’t-shatter-the-porcelain decorum, might work.
I stand by my snip…Markos’s pathetic attempt at justifying the unjustifiable doesn’t alter his feeling of ‘vindication’ for his incredibly tasteless, insensitive, and cruel comment…but there it is, for all the world to see, if you feel differently…
At the American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta credulously swallows the 3.7 million weekly readers stat whole, while noting that Newsweek has 3.2 million subscribers. Yes, well, the difference is that Newsweek‘s 3.2 million subscribers is an actually meaningful number, you see, one that is subject to audits, and let’s not forget, people actually PAY for Newsweek…really, there is no comparison at all…
UPDATE 4 12/23/05 8:47 a.m.: Markos himself puts the number of visitors at 500,000 per week here (still quite a bit on the high side, I would think). And a thank you to Jon Henke for the kind words and link, as well…
UPDATE 5 12/23/05 8:24 p.m.: Thanks to the folks at RealClearPolitics for putting this post on the front page – my first time for this honor…and many thanks to the great Tim Blair…
I think the 1.3 million number is analogous to a reader of the Wall Street Journal buying one copy, reading one article, putting it down, later reading the editorials, putting it down, and later on reading the International News. For the Daily Kos that would amount to three users.
For my part, I probably will read the WSJ at ten different points of time during the day. Yet I’m only one man. Except for my other personalites. Such as Evie, the cockney flower seller. “Posies for the missus, gov’nor?” But Evie doesn’t read the WSJ so she wouldn’t count.
The Kossacks remind me most of the Stalinists who kept on believing in communism even after all the show trials and the killing of all the Kulaks. They could not bring themselves to understand that what they were believing was all emperor’s clothes. They also refused to believe that Alger Hiss was a spy even after it was proven and that the Rosenbergs were spies even after that was proven also. The Kossacks keep telling each other how bright they are and how right they are even after the voters turn down all they offer. They claim to be for the common man but they act as if they are the uncommon man who is a natural born leader to tell us who to follow and what to do.
What I find funny is that even after the Chinese Communists under Mao turned all the intelligentsia into peasants these people still follow him. Even though Che was a stone murderer they still follow him as well. The thing is that if they ever did have a revolution that is the group that would be first up against the wall for the firing squad.
Will, Will, Will,
We had a supposed expert on all that stuff. His name was Bill Clinton. All he did way try to game the system for his own personal gratification. Now we’re getting to watch his other half (minus the stinky misplaced cigar) try to do the same thing. Fool me once ….and so on. You hate Bush because he’s not one of the pragmatic bastards you spawn out of the Dem party. He’s everything you Libs are not, which is why he continually out manuevers you. And it really chaps your butt.
And the Putin remark is just another example of the Dem ignorance of how to deal with Russians. Something that I happen to have a lot of experience with. It was a set up, dummy. He knew he had to roll Putin on the Iraqi debt relief. Putin didn’t know what hit him when Baker delivered the death blow. Bush went one better than the Gipper’s
“Trust but Verify”……Hold your friends close and your enemies closer so that when you coldcock them you don’t have to reach as far.
Two words for you….Denny Crane.
sgpi11: Amen – the Annointed seem to me to be composed of the Self-Annointed plus the Meme Adopters, who simply repeat the memes in order to be “in” or “elite” or “sophisticated”, thus Annointed also – and potentially in control.
The Self-Annointed act as if they think they channel the Ideal – that ideas which pop into their heads must be correct simply on that basis. Howard Dean, for example, has virtually admitted this in explaining that he knows his pop-up ideas must be correct because his “unconscious” must have worked on them.
But the Self-Annointed therefore differ from the extreme Evangelist who overtly claims that God has actually talked to him/her – but of course not to anyone else.
Yet all Annointed in practice rely upon group acceptance as the immediate proof of the correctness of their ideas – acceptance as evidenced by the echos, most importantly those produced by the Grand Echo Chamber known as the MSM, or perhaps also by the “Europeans” or “Our Allies”. And now even by Saddam Husein.
Proof by virtue of getting something done – literally anything – manifested by making the rest of us do it, comes later.
The ironic but not surprising thing about Communism is that it produces exactly that which it says it opposes: a State in which a materialistic Elite – the Party – completely enslaves the rest of the population, an epitome of control.
Oh how I have longed for a return by Freud! Could Thomas Sowell be it?
History has not as yet recorded a shortage of con men…or pigeons.
[...] Mark Coffey at Decision ‘08 has an interesting recap of the liberal fawning over the Daily Kos blog. One excerpt caught my eye and begged a question: [...]
This is a bit off thread but I have to say how gratifying it is to hear from people reading Thomas Sowell…and his latest, “Black Rednecks White Liberals” is absolutely brilliant, maybe the single most enlightening sets of research I’ve ever read. Explains sooooo much about the way people are acting today, all based on historical research. Answers questions I’ve had for years. Highly recommend this book.
And BTW, way good chat here, thanks.
Nora