Daily Kos and Andrew Sullivan: Merchants of Hate

Some time back, when I reported on Daily Kos' vehemently anti-Semitic essay, "Eulogy Before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel," left-wing commenters here argued that the post was "just a diary," and did not reflect the views of Markos Moultisas himself.

I utterly reject that view, of course, and I've shown here repeatedly that Kos indeed welcomes both the diary contributions AND the individual comments found in the threads to his blog's diaries and essays (commenters at Daily Kos aren't just commenters, "They are creators of content”).

These facts are relevant to the recent left-wing smear attacks against Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Almost as soon as John McCain announced Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, Daily Kos began spreading rumors that Governor Palin's 17 year-old daughter Bristol was the mother of Palin's son Trig.

In response to the backlash from the McCain campaign and conservatives, Moultisas refused to take down the allegations, telling the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that the smears were "legitimate" journalism:

The intensity of media inquiries [into Sarah Palin's background] hit a new level after an anonymous blogger on the liberal Web site Daily Kos last weekend charged that McCain's running mate is actually the grandmother of Trig Palin, the 4-month-old baby born with Down syndrome, and that the real mother is her daughter, 17-year-old Bristol Palin. That led to mainstream media inquiries, which prompted the McCain camp to disclose in a statement Monday that Bristol is five months pregnant and plans to have the baby and marry the teenage father.

The site's founder, Markos Moulitsas, said he did not know the contributor's identity but thought that the admittedly "weird" pregnancy questions were a legitimate line of inquiry that he should not suppress.

Keep in mind, that Moultisas has announced that Daily Kos represents the "mainstream" of the Democratic Party, and Moulitsas and Barack Obama openly coordinated on the publication of Obama's certification birth at Daily Kos in June.

Moultisas' key ally in spreading the anti-Palin hate rumors has been Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, and Sullivan's in fact been the originator of some of the nastiest untruths seeking to destroy the Palin family.

Sullivan's extremism continues this morning. As Darleen Click shows, Sullivan's gone off the deep end with a post attacking Jewish influence in Sarah Palin's foreign policy coaching:

I’m posting a screenshot because I’d rather not link to RAWMUSLGLUTES more than necessary. This morning he is little more than Palin-vulva-phobia spewing. However, in one instance he likes to spread a thin film of anti-Semitism over the PDS like room-temperature cream cheese scraped across a nicely toasted bagel:

Plus, Ace of Spades takes the baton from Dean Barnett to shed additional light on Sullivan's smear merchandising:

Andrew Sullivan is known for many things -- general histrionics, "excitability," intellectual shallowness that requires him to blog about the only things he's marginally capable of discussing (emotion and scandal), unquenchable vanity, a guileless passion for conspiracy theories of all sort, "gobsmacking" outbursts of hypocrisy and inconsistency so laughable he's chiefly read for his inadvertent entertainment, casual antisemtism that was all the rage at British boarding schools but doesn't play as well in America, power glutes, seeking anonymous three-way sex, and an endless stream of insults that sound vaguely "smart" but are really just variations of "fascist" and "hater" tarted-up with a thesaurus and some memories of introductory-level college classes.

And that's the just the beginning! .

Sullivan's a mainstream journalist as well as a partisan blogger, and nowadays that's getting to be a distinction without a difference. Prominent hard-line leftist blogs and top journalists at previously respectable institutions like the Atlantic, can slime, smear, and slander, while the principle of journalistic objectivity is sacrificed upon the altar of Barack Hussein Obama, aka "The One."

There's no denying these facts.

Markos Moultisas and Andrew Sullivans are hate-filled smear merchants. Those who want to argue that Kos doesn't endorse this stuff, or Sullivan's a "legitimate" reporter, are living in an alternative reality.