Informed Speculation

TNR responds to Kos’s latest attack, via Jonathan Chait:

I realize that the new, counterintuitive thing to say about the left blogosphere these days is that it’s not really that radical. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga says nice things about Mark Warner, which means he’s really just a pragmatist (or easily co-opted, but the effect is the same). All this is mostly true. What this interpretation misses, however, is that the radicalism of the lefty bloggers lies not so much in their ideological platform but in their ideological style. They think like sectarians. And that style is on perfect display in Kos’s attack on The New Republic.

Kos announces in his headline, “TNR‘s defection to the Right is now complete.” If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it is. More than two years ago, Kos launched what he called his “anti-TNR campaign,” in which he declared us to be enemies of the people. Wait, sorry, wrong jargon–I meant, enemies of the people-powered movement. Some examples of the anti-TNR campaign can be found here, here, and here.

He has refused to link to our stories–except of course the minority that attack the left, all the better to display our enemy status–and declared us irrelevant and buried in the dustbin of history. Except now, two years after having unleashed his most terrible weapons, he has to bury us all over again. And so, he urges his readers, “If you still hold a subscription to that magazine, it really is time to call it quits.” This is like the Catholic Church digging up the heretic it had already burned at the stake so it can excommunicate the corpse a second time.

…Kos explains, again lapsing into hilariously crude jargon, that TNR “seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners.”

… The paranoid mentality that Kos displays is obviously incapable of grasping the possibility that an institution like TNR might not act monolithically, and might publish articles simply because they are true and interesting rather than in the service of some political goal. Still, I wonder how he reconciles his dark interpretation with the fact that most of our staff published written endorsements of other Democratic candidates. I, to take one example, wrote that “the Democratic Party would have to be crazy to nominate Joe Lieberman for president.” That line must have slipped right past them. Even our most pro-Lieberman staffer, Peter Beinart, wrote a recent column in which he criticized Lieberman just as strongly as the left blogosphere, angering die-hard Lieberman backer Marshall Wittmann. All this is pretty hard to square with the notion that everything TNR does is directed by its owners and designed for the greater glory of Joe Lieberman. 

It should be illegal to have as much fun as I am with this story…watch out, Jonathan, he’ll sue you!…

Once more, for the record, though, because we don’t want the story to die because of lack of oxygen…let’s all recall that this is because Kos co-author and Mark Warner campaign employee Jerome Armstrong has entered into a consent decree with the SEC over charges of stock manipulation…

…just in case you had forgotten…