Kos Krash?
Noel Sheppard has an interesting article up over at Real Clear Politics about all the negative attention Kos has been getting recently. He also examines signs of internal dissent.
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.
I've posted about the dust-up with TNR and other major media, but hadn't really mentioned the number of fairly well known left-wing people who have expressed negativity about what is happening at Kos lately.
Sounds like real world Machiavellian politics have crashed the gates, doesn't it? Yet, O'Connor is not the only Kossack having such doubts. The day before she posted her personal revelations, Richard Silverstein wrote another blog - this one conspicuously not posted at DKos - entitled "Don't Cross the 'Cult of Kos' or You'll Live to Regret It." In it, Silverstein raised a very important question:
[H]ow does a political blogger who endorses candidates at his site create a transparent environment when he may also be consulting for-or have some other undisclosed relationship with-some of these same candidates?
So, trouble in paradise or a tempest in a teapot? Hard to say. All I know is that I stay off the Kos site as much as humanly possible because the level of vitriol is so high. I don't know if Kos will survive, implode or simply fade away. My crystal ball is on the fritz today. But I think there are some cracks showing. Part of that is that nothing survives long in a corrosive atmosphere.
Blogosphere | Gaius Wednesday, 12 July , 2006
By Shawn, Wednesday, 12 July , 2006 @ 8:24 pm
Hmm. Kos as a modern day Boss Tweed? Daily Kos a new Tammany Hall? Might make for a funny post…or a bad Broadway musical.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 12 July , 2006 @ 8:31 pm
I’d go with the musical. Look what it did for Mel Brooks!
By TC@LeatherPenguin, Wednesday, 12 July , 2006 @ 9:27 pm
Please. Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine, besides being crazy corrupt, backed candidates who actually won and got things done. Sure those things helped line Tweed and his cronies’ pockets, but hey didn’t just sit in a bar and yell at each other. There is a big gorgeous building behind City Hall–the Tweed Courthouse as testament to their ability to get things done after they took over the city’s politics…, Kos and the kidz haven’t managed to win anything to this point.
Boss Tweed would see a guy like Kos as an annoyance and have a longshoreman toss him in the East River, which the current Dems lack the nerve to do.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 12 July , 2006 @ 9:51 pm
Which could be an absolutely boffo finish for the musical!
By TC@LeatherPenguin, Thursday, 13 July , 2006 @ 3:19 am
LOL! The ghost of Tweed comes out and throttles Kos for perverting the Tammany Template.
By Gaius, Thursday, 13 July , 2006 @ 5:12 am
Nah, just ducks him a couple of times singing an ode to graft!