Daily Kos

Want to understand the liberal mind?  Check out Daily Kos creator Markos Moulitsas on this evening's Schultz show . .

Why does Kos say he hates the Taliban?  Because they aided and abetted Osama Bin Laden in the murder of thousands of Americans?  Nope.  That they are actively engaged in killing American troops in Afghanistan? Guess again.  No, the Taliban's real crime—the only complaint Kos mentions— is that . . . they're not PC.  Not feminist. Not gay-friendly. Hell, they might even be opposed to stem cell research.

Oh, and for good measure, Kos calls conservative Republicans like Michelle Bachmann "the American Taliban."  What was that about dissent being patriotic?

Although many in the mainstream media write off the Democratic Underground as somewhat sanity challenged, they continue to praise the Daily Kos Kossacks as somehow being "reasonable progressives." The truth is that the Kossacks are every bit as loony as their DU cousins as you can see in this Daily Kos thread about what they hope will be the real outcome of the civilian trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The conviction or acquittal of KSM is pretty much beside the point for most of the Kossacks. Their real hope for this trial is that they can use it as a weapon against what they call "BushCo." which is also the desire of many others on the left along with their MSM allies.

As you take the plunge into the depths of lunacy, keep in mind that many prominent people in both politics and the MSM continue to post at the Daily Kos. However, despite despite the clear Kossack derangement, we do need to thank them for being honest enough to post openly what many others are secretly thinking.

And now the Kossack KSM trial outcome fantasies begin:

Americans will be reminded again of what the Bush administration's reckless, immoral and counterproductive pro-torture policies have meant both for those we have detained and for our ability to prosecute them for their alleged crimes.

The Daily Kos is letting its metaphors run wild against conservatives. Ken Cuccinelli, a solidly conservative state senator running for Attorney General, is described as a monster:

And whether or not dragons exist, monsters do. Sometimes they run for political office. I believe if one looks at the public record of Steve's opponent, State Senator Ken Cuccinelli, one will see someone whose record in public office and his declared intentions have monstrous implications.

Then the blogger called "teacherken" says these conservative monsters and dragons should be killed. He might mean defeating them at the ballot box. Maybe. If the writer were conservative, no one would assume anything but the real words on the page: kill.

At the edges of some medieval maps one might see the legend "here there be dragons" with illustrations of sea serpents. These marked the end of the known world, with the fears inherent in the unknown.

And yet, as children know, the monsters and dragons are part of everyday existence. They are under the bed, they are in our imagination, some seek to use them to manipulate use - pace the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs and others of their ilk.

Oops!

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, has discovered that his endorsement can be  political poison. Such was the case with his endorsement at the beginning of this month of the very liberal Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, in the New York 23rd CD special election:

Club for Growth darling Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party line, and has even garnered the endorsement of Fred Thompson. The guy has legitimate traction, fueled by the fact that Dede Scozzafava, the Republican, is actually the most liberal candidate in the race. (Heck, she has run on the very liberal Working Families Party ballot line in the past.)

Sure, she is a Republican, and opposes the public option. But she's been willing to raise taxes when budgets require it, and is to the left of most Democrats on social issues (including supporting gay marriage). That's why conservatives are panicked about her -- for a party that is becoming more regional, more conservative, more ideologically rigid, Scozzafava's brand of moderate conservatism is grating. Hence, Hoffman has a real shot at not just playing spoiler and undermining the GOP candidate's chances, but also of potentially winning.

As a congresswoman, she could either move even more to the left to properly represent her progressive-trending district and be a pain in the side of the GOP caucus (they have nothing like our Blue Dogs), or Democrats can field a real Democrat to challenge her in 2010.

Some blog posts about Fox News on the Daily Kos blog are so bizarre you wonder if they are real. The diarist "Brentbent" fussed on Wednesday that the socialist bloc should never put Fox in capitals:

CNN and MSNBC are supposed to be all caps because they are acronyms...each letter represents a word. Fox is not an acronym. If marginalization is the goal then people should stop capping it like CNN or MSNBC. It is Fox News or Fox but it is not FOX...Let's stop equating Fox as an equal to MSNBC or CNN by stopping the capping of Fox.

Yes, I am being a bit pedantic here but, in the long run, these things matter. If you grow up seeing MSNBC, CNN, and FOX on your screen over and over it seems to legitimize Fox as a real news agency. So I am hoping to curtail this phenomenon at least amongst the progressive community, where I see it happen all too often. And we all know spelling it FOX will cause a massive butterfly effect that will end up with the soul of Hitler inside Jenna Bush running the nation and starting World War 4. (The media elites kept WW3 hidden from us.) So whatever you do don't spell it FOX!

Cenk Uygur of the leftist "Young Turks" radio show wrote up a funny list of "three categories of media" for the Daily Kos, putting Fox News in the category "partisan press" with Mother Jones and National Review magazines, but putting ABC, CNN, the New York Times, and the MSNBC "News Programs" on a list called "Straight News."

He also suggested they're about as much a news organization as...Air America radio.

In a Monday blog post insisting the White House is "100% Right" to suggest Fox isn't a real news network, Uygur insisted "The Obama White House has taken on Fox News channel in an effort to point out they are not a legitimate news network. This is very important because out of all the outlets mentioned above, they are the only ones being dishonest about what category they are in." Here's the list:

In an October 20 The Gaggle blog post, Newsweek's David A. Graham sought to explain to readers why the New York 23rd Congressional District special election on November 3 "is more important than" the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races.

Graham portrayed the race -- pitting liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava against Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and Democratic candidate Bill Owens -- as a bellwether fight for the soul of the Republican Party. Graham noted Scozzafava's socially liberal stances, implying that conservative ire over her nomination tothe GOP ticket in the special election was based solely on the ire of social conservatives.

Yet nowhere in his blog post did Graham explain that economic conservatives and libertarian-leaning Republicans worry Scozzafava is truly a Republican-in-name-only (RINO) on economic matters as well, given her ties to ACORN.

As Human Events reporter John Gizzi noted a month ago (emphasis mine):

Unsurprisingly, Obama's Nobel Prize sparked the daily Two Minutes Hate for Bush at the Daily Kos. It's apparently only been nine months since we were a terrorist nation, according to blogger Crispian Day. He thought it was a joke that anyone would question that Obama was fully deserving of the honor:

In just eight months President Obama has taken us from looking like crazed, bible distributing (in Arabic no less) war mongering, macho, family killing raping and torturing nation that we WERE into a nation of peace seeking. Are you kidding me?

You think that's easy... try getting two people who don't like each other to change... just two. He has turned the outlook of the whole world from one where everyone was worried about WW3 or WMD or Nukes, or mounting terrorism into a world of hope....

Political analyst Charlie Cook sells himself as "independent, nonpartisan" pundit, but then how does it look when he’s donating his time and talent to a fundraising auction for Netroots Nation, the hard-left blogger convention? He’s offering "Coffee with Charlie Cook and a 1-Year Subscription to the Cook Report."

That’s not the biggest surprise: the Daily Kosmonaut crowd can also bid on the "Survivor Gabon Buff Autographed by Jeff Probst." At least that gift wasn't donated by the celebrity. The Netroots Nation convention began with the name Yearly Kos in 2006 and 2007.

UPDATE: Charlie Cook responded by e-mail with this message:

So with a waiting period, it doesn't seem like much of an opportunity to respond immediately to the item about me this morning, but maybe you will post this anyway.

Did I participate in a panel at Netroots Nation and when asked, did I say yes on donating "a lunch with Charlie Cook? Yes.

The New York Times announced today that it would appoint an editor to monitor 'opinion media'. In an attempt to respond to criticism that it has been too slow to pick up on stories first reported by conservative blogs and talk show hosts, the Times acknowledged poor coverage, but denied a political agenda.

The self-proclaimed 'paper of record' was extremely slow in picking up on two recent stories. The first, the 'trutherism' of former White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, was initially reported by Pajamas Media, and later by Glenn Beck on his Fox News talk show. The Times did not cover the story until after Jones had resigned.

Later, the Times neglected to report on the undercover sting operation that exposed ACORN for offering assistance in a bogus child prostitution ring. The Times reported on Congress's votes to de-fund ACORN, but neglected to mention the sting operation that inspired the votes.

Over the last several weeks, no one has been the target of the left-wing media and blogosphere more than Fox News host Glenn Beck, even more so than his radio host counterpart Rush Limbaugh.

Although conservatives have decried the daily ad hominem attacks, some voices on the left are starting to realize that's not an effective strategy for championing their cause, especially when it comes to the hot-button issue of the day, health care.

And that is really starting to bother Air America host Lionel - that is the daily repetitive nature of attacking Glenn Beck and/or Rush Limbaugh by giving a litany of complaints about what they said, as he laid out in a nearly three-minute tirade on his September 14 Air America radio show.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas on the Midday Open Thread, Thursday: "As bad as Rep. Joe Wilson's behavior was last night, look on the bright side -- at least he wasn't carrying a sign that said 'Obama = Hitler'. Or a loaded rifle."

Also Markos on Thursday, lauding Joe Wilson’s Democrat opponent: "Overall, Rob Miller is close to hitting $400,000 from almost 11,000 patriots sick and tired of Republicans like Rep. Joe Wilson trying to debase our democracy." (More here.)

Markos Moulitsas, opponent of debasing democracy, on the Midday Open Thread, Wednesday edition, on conservatives causing the resignation of radical leftist Van Jones: "It would be nice if the White House learned, as Baratunde notes, that they can't negotiate with terrorists."

Guess who's not pleased about Van Jones middle-of-the-night-on-a-holiday-weekend resignation? Perhaps you never would have seen this one coming, but no other MSNBC "Countdown" host and provocateur Keith Olbermann himself.

Bitter and seeing red? Perhaps. In a post on the Daily Kos dated Sept. 6, Olbermann urged the half-crazed liberal Kos readers to go digging for dirt on Fox News host Glenn Beck, Beck's radio producer Stu Burguiere and Fox News president Roger Ailes. (h/t Morgen of Verum Serum)

"I don't know why I've got this phrasing in my head, but: Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes," Olbermann wrote. "No, even now, I refuse to go all caps. No, sending me links to the last two Countdowns with my own de-constructions of his biblical vision quality Communist/Fascist/Socialist/Zimbalist art at Rockefeller Center (where, curiously, he works, Comrade) doesn't count. Nor does sending me links to specious inappropriate point-underscoring prove-you're-innocent made-up rumors."

Anima at The Daily Kos is furious at the idea that the insurance lobbyists (or the "murder-by-spreadsheet industry") will get a "public option" stripped from the health bill. But the metaphors are a bit distasteful:  

How unbelievably infuriating it will be if we get a watered-down, junk bill and then have to listen to Rahm tell us how it's a "victory." Yes, let's give the American people a nice, big glass of urine on the rocks and call it the most delicious lemonade they done ever tasted!...

Over at Daily Kos, bloggers aren't merely mourning Ted Kennedy's death. Some are declaring that this moment is the time for health "reform," and the only obstacle is Republicans who killed New Orleans and laughed about it. The blogger "cskendrick" declared on Wednesday:

The acrimony surrounding health care reform is not the litmus test of our Republic. This test we took not so long ago - and we failed this test utterly.

How did we fail? We let the Republicans kill a major U.S. city. We let them laugh about it and walk away. We all failed New Orleans. We failed its rights, its lives, its health, its rightful place in our compassion. I was resistant to the message not so long ago but it is true - We. All. Failed. NOLA. The Republicans failed it gladly and boldly. The Democrats failed to take them to task for this abomination.

Liberals in the mainstream media may publicly pretend that the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate so-called torture in the CIA is non-political but to the members of the Daily Kos it is all about politics.

The politics of revenge.

On the heels of the Eric Holder Justice Department dropping a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party for threatening voters with billy clubs in Philadelphia, it was announced yesterday that Holder will appoint a prosecutor to investigate the CIA over the loud protests of that agency's director, Leon Panetta.

Despite the public pretenses of many liberals that the investigation has nothing to do with politics, the crazed bloodlust comments at the Daily Kos shows it has everything to do with politics...and revenge:

When George W. Bush was in the White House, one of the leading anti-war voices in the nation was the ultra-liberal website Daily Kos.

Now that Barack Obama is President, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are mysteriously no longer of such great concern to the Netroots.

I guess the anti-war movement was much more about getting Bush out of office than getting our troops out of harm's way.

Such was reported by the Washington Examiner's Byron York Tuesday (h/t Paul Chesser):

It is said that the people are revolting.

You said it! They stink on ice!

That pretty much sums up the attitude of the Kossacks at the Daily Kos. However, unlike the Mel Brooks version of King Louis XVI in "History of the World: Part I," the Kossacks are fearful, deeply fearful, of the people. They are worried that the Tea Party protesters who show up at the town hall meetings conducted by members of Congress might derail Obamacare due to the large turnouts and vehemence of their protests as you can see in this thread posted by Kossack icebergslim:

Sure, it is a bunch of nuts or really UNINFORMED constituents who are buying into the argument of the NON-ARGUMENT of the Republican Party for health care reform.

The Obama White House needs to get out of the bubble and get real here. We all know that the lobbyists and insurance companies are ARMED TO THE NINES to defeat any health care reform, UNLESS THEY WRITE IT.  Since they can not WRITE IT, they will destroy it.  Simple as that.

Why is this dangerous?

These folks are ON TELEVISION, getting eyeballs, and making traction.  Worried yet?  Sure, it may be just a few, but a few can rollerball into many.  The Democrats have not sold the health care reform argument because there is no f---ing bill by them.  Are we shooting the bullets into our feet yet?

The media is so dramatically conservative in Washington, D.C. that Grover Norquist outranks former Democrat presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates in the booking order. So claimed the Daily Kos blogger known as "Dengre" in a post on "The bias we fight." Be amazed: 

And as we fight we need to know that we start every round of every battle at a disadvantage. If you are a liberal or a progressive you are always a dirty f***ing hippie --- always a weak-ass panda in this Bourgeois Town. And Conservatives are always the voice of power with access to any media outlet they wish to use. Grover Norquist can get on any show he wants to be booked on and he will always be treated as a serious player. Al Gore, Howard Dean or Jimmy Carter will never be given the respect that the inside-the-beltway crowd gives Norquist and the rest of his merry band of conservative think tank thieves. The gap is big.

Grover Norquist is a serious Washington insider, but let's not suggest that if he threw a huge anti-Gore concert to laugh at the hype over global warming, NBC would broadcast it for 75 hours. He also hasn't guest-hosted the Olbermann show like Howard Dean just did.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration waged a more ardent and aggressive public-relations battle against the tobacco industry than they did against Osama bin Laden. Daily Kos blogger "Bill in Portland, Maine" takes his militaristic whimsey to Winston-Salem, North Carolina today, imagining the invasion and occupation of a cigarette manufacturer:

Overall, thirty two percent of active-duty military personnel smoke, compared with 20 percent of the U.S. population in general.  Because of that, there's a movement afoot inside the Pentagon to ban the use of tobacco because it's killed so many of our troops.  I have another suggestion: let's invade and conquer the facilities of RJ Reynolds.  After all, their WMDs have cost us more in lives and treasure than Saddam ever did.  Plus Saddam didn’t recruit kids with a cartoon camel that thought he was cool but was actually a dick.

This sounds like a bad John Cusack movie. He also blamed Team Bush for increased nicotine addiction:

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Is Vancouver Sun writer a Daily Kos contributor?

MSNBC's David Shuster on Saturday told his fans at Twitter that he intends to report on some ugly comments made about President Obama's daughter Malia at the conservative website Free Republic last week.

For those unaware, a British Daily Mail article about a peace sign t-shirt Malia was wearing in Rome before the start of the G-8 summit was posted at Free Republic Wednesday evening.

According to the Vancouver Sun, this generated some tasteless remarks (readers are advised to see update at end of post dealing with this writer's possible connection to Daily Kos):

On his Midday Open Thread Thursday, Daily Kos chief Markos Moulitsas found it very easy to associate the Republican Party ethos with spoiled tots:

I remember writing this about my son:

Right now, he's a Republican.
What's his is his, and he won't share.
What's mine is his, because he "wants it".
And if he gets angry and frustrated,
He hits people, preemptively!

He's now five and has evolved somewhat past this, developing a nice sense of empathy. But my 2-year-old daughter is VERY MUCH in her Republican phase. So the baton has been passed...

It sounds just a little like the infamous Peter Jennings post-election commentary in 1994, doesn't it?

In today's "This Is One of the Scariest Things I've Ever Read" segment, a Kos Kid thinks MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is trustworthy, fair, and unbiased.

Feels like Halloween, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, in this love letter to the "Countdown" host that amazingly made Daily Kos's recommended diaries list, that was just the tip of the iceberg:

In today's "Does His Ego Know No Bounds?" segment, Keith Olbermann warned Daily Kos readers on Friday that they should not post diaries or comments critical of him for it strengthens the Right.

As NewsBusters Mitchell Blatt reported Friday, a diary was posted at Daily Kos on July 18 that bashed the "Countdown" host for just attacking Republicans and not doing any real news.

Olbermann clearly was displeased, and posted a response that was two parts Narcissus and one part Norman Bates (h/t Hot Air):

Just about a year ago, Keith Olbermann recorded his first major victory over Bill O’Reilly.

Over the first week of June, 2008, Olbermann beat O’Reilly in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic for the first time.

“We’re growing, and he’s regressed,” Olbermann said to the New York Times in an email.

Like most of what he says, that turned out being wildly inaccurate.

One year later, Olbermann is posting his lowest ratings of the year, down 26% from last year, and even liberals at the Huffington Post and Daily Kos are starting to disparage him.

Michael Rowe has an article on the Huffington Post, posted today, that makes a few wild-eyed claims about right-wing extremists.

For example, Ann Coulter is responsible for yesterday’s tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum.

Bill O’Reilly is responsible for the shooting of well-known abortion doctor George Tiller.

Oh, and the coup de grace: Sarah Palin and all of her supporters are raging racists.

That’s not to mention the implication that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, and all of Fox News were the favorite news sources of James von Brunn, now-infamous shooter at the Holocaust museum.

Idiotic though these claims most certainly are, liberal bilge of this magnitude demands confrontation.  First, examine what Rowe wrote on Ann Coulter:

Wasn't it just a couple of days ago that the crew over at the Daily Kos was fretting about how conservatives as a whole are equally as complicit in the murder of George Tiller as the shooter himself?  And of the details being reported to better understand the background of the actual killer, Scott Roeder, doesn't one major detail involve the posts that he left on anti-abortion Web sites?

With that in mind, how concerned should we be with a blog post that fantasizes about the death of conservative columnist Michelle Malkin? 

In a posting titled ‘Michelle Malkin - The Book', an individual using the handle cousinavi, creates a story which refers to Malkin's husband in a derogatory manner more than once, and eventually fantasizes about her choking to death. 

Should this story, which appears to be written at a third grade level, be taken for what the ‘writer' intends - a ‘total work of fiction'?  Or should it be taken for what it really is, an attempt to get Kos readers to indulge in the ‘writer's' imagination, inciting equally provocative death fantasies about Malkin? 

Excerpts below the jump (Warning!  Offensive language, equally offensive to those with an education)...

While the far left is blaming Bill O’Reilly and the pro-life movement for the death of George Tiller, another shooting has left military recruiter William Long dead at the hands of an anti-military Muslim convert.

Mainstream liberals like Keith Olbermann and news sources like NBC have already blamed O'Reilly for Tiller's death, as have websites like Salon, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

Markos Moulitsas may have celebrated the deaths of Blackwater fighters and wished for a similar fate for Michelle Malkin, but nevermind that.

As if you couldn't see this coming...

Fresh off the Daily Kos website is a posting entitled, A "Pro-Life" activist took the Life of a doctor who practices abortion today, which illogically takes two sentences to link the murderer to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck (emphasis mine throughout). 

A so-called Pro-Life activist took, cowardly, the life of doctor George Tiller, this sunday, while he was attending to a church service. I bet Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and the other will praise the killer since "he only killed a liberullllllll" according to them

Grammatical issues aside (something that the Kos seemingly requires from their writers), the incredible leap from the death of George Tiller, to three leading conservative talk show hosts is shocking to people who make their home here on Earth.  Four conservative talk show hosts actually, if you consider the phrase ‘and the other', which would presumably be referring to Michael Savage. 

More stunning is that this posting was allowed to present the statement - "he only killed a liberullllllll" according to them - as if it is a quote drawn from one of their shows.  I would challenge the author, LaurenMonica, or anyone at the Daily Kos to present an audio copy of any of these conservative talk show hosts in which they heap praise upon a killer because, "he only killed a liberullllllll".  (On a side note, I also challenge them to present a college transcript which shows they were able to pass English Composition 101).

Of course, this isn't where it stops with the liberal blogs.

For those highly mistaken people who think the liberals are the ones who bring gentleness and compassion and reasonableness to the political debate, we always have the rebuttal. It’s called the Daily Kos. This Thursday "diary" recently made it to the top of the Kosmonauts’ recommended list, despite the fact that the writer needs his keyboard washed out with soap:

F*** you Dick Cheney! F*** your pompous condecension. F*** your straw men! F*** your mischaracterizations! F*** your sniveling attempts to keep you and your buddies asses out of federal (somewhat offensive movie quote removed, happy now?) prison! F*** your presumption that we are a bunch of cowering idiots looking for daddy to protect us from the big bad terrorists. Just F*** YOU!...

That’s just the beginning. There’s 23 F-bombs in all from the author, code named "XneeOCon." (I wouldn’t want my real name attached to this foam-flecked fit, either.) Below it is a poll asking if Cheney is an a-hole a f-ing a-hole, or pie. The "FA" option is winning as of Sunday morning, with more than 3,000 votes (and 94 percent of the total.)

In case one believes that this kind of radicalism is rare, here are some other recent Kos droppings to step around: