Friday, December 23, 2005

Kos

Daily Kos has inspired a lot of posts on the right side of the Blogosphere because of this piece in Washington Monthly. Gus Van Horn has a long analysis of lefty bloggers, Kos in particular.

One of Kos’s famous moments:


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.”
As Crank put it:

…the problem with Kos' remarks is that they were vicious and mean, and effectively took sides with a lynch mob. Now, I recognize that many on the Right have been equally rough on Ahmed Yassin, Uday and Qusay, and even on less thoroughly evil figures like Rachel Corrie. But there's a common denominator there: those are all people who chose to take sides with those who want to kill us. They're on the other side.

And that's how Kos treated the men who were lynched in Fallujah: as not on his side. Except that, whatever you think of "mercenaries" and their motives… there's no dispute that these guys' were in ultimately in Iraq because the Coalition Provisional Authority wanted them there to assist in its efforts to rebuild the country into a democracy. The fact that Kos sees the people engaged in that task as being on the other side puts him, at least emotionally, on the side of the lynch mob, the fascists, and the Islamists.


Asked about the “Screw them” remark in the Washington Monthly piece, Kos said he felt “Vindicated.”

Kos is your standard anti-American leftist, exceptional only in his callousness.

“Everybody says I'm an asshole, and they're right, I am,” Moulitsas says.

Anyone who can say “Screw them” about the victims of mob violence, and to this day only feel “vindicated” is a moral monster. He has the capacity of becoming the type Hayek wrote about in his chapter called “Why the Worst Get On Top” in The Road to Serfdom.

The scary thing is that Kos IS getting to the top -- of the Democrat Party, anyway.

Moulitsas used the site to raise $500,000 for Democratic candidates in the last
election cycle—making him one of the party's top fund-raisers…

Moulitsas has become so well incorporated into the party machinery that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) uses him to recruit candidates.
****

Given the electoral history of the last 33 years, Republicans must be salivating at the rise of the McGovernite wing of the Democrat Party, as seen in Kos and the DNC Chairman, Howard Dean. McGovern was wiped out by Nixon in 1972. Since then, the only two Democrats to be elected president are southern governors who ran as moderates.

(And poor Hillary! Here she is, married to one of the shrewdest political minds in America, positioning herself to repeat her husband’s moderate path to the White House. And she has Cindy Sheehan calling her out on the war and Kos trying to destroy the DLC.)

I think the Republicans are crazy if they get overconfident at the rise of the left in the Democrat Party. America is a different place than it was 33 years ago. That’s 33 years of the New Leftist ideologies of multiculturalism, feminism and environmentalism -- 33 years of egalitarianism, statism and collectivism -- infiltrating our culture in countless ways from the profound to the trivial. There is no guarantee that the American “sense of life,” in 1972 the last glow of our heritage of individualism, has not been corrupted.

All it takes is one crisis. One crisis -- a crisis the Democrats and their media allies are desperate to gin up, encourage and bring to fruition -- and after the next presidential election the McGovernites could be answering the mail at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Kos or people like him could be walking the corridor of the West Wing.

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