Informed Speculation

More evidence that Kos and his cohort Jerome Armstrong (recently revealed to be a party to a consent decree with the SEC regarding stock manipulation) are feeling the heat, as the pushback has begun in earnest, despite Kos’s earlier plea to ‘starve the story of oxygen’. Here’s Kos:

People talk about the need for the left to work together and have a unified message in the face of a unified conservative noise machine. So a google group was created called “Townhouse”, and it included many bloggers and other representatives of the netroots as well as a large number of partisan journalists and grassroots groups. It allowed us to discuss policy, issues, tactics and coordinate as much as you can ever get a bunch of liberals to coordinate.

There was one big rule for this list, an important cog in the growing Vast Left Wing Conspiracy — everything discussed was off the record.

That was obviously violated today as the New Republic betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners; that it stands with the National Review and wingnutoshpere in their opposition to grassroots Democrats.

The magazine published, in its website, an email I sent to the list. There is nothing controversial about the email, but Jason Zengerle tried to spin it as evidence that there is a “smoke-filled room” and that I send “dictats” to other bloggers, controlling what they can and cannot write about. In a subsequent post, Zengerle went further, saying that I control the financial fates of much of the progressive blogosphere. My power apparently knows no bounds!

Ludicrous, all of it, but that’s the new rules of the game. TNR and its enablers are feeling the heat of their own irrelevance and this is how they fight it — by undermining the progressive movement. Zengerle has made common cause with the wingnutosphere, using the laughable “kosola” frame they created and emailing his “scoops” to them for links. This is what the once-proud New Republic has evolved into — just another cog of the Vast RIGHT Wing Conspiracy.

If you still hold a subscription to that magazine, it really is time to call it quits. If you see it in a magazine rack, you might as well move it behind the National Review or even NewsMax, since that’s who they want to be associated with these days.

Well, that’s it, then – I’m convinced. Of course, it’s Joe Lieberman that’s behind it all, and the solution is to hide copies of The New Republic if you should see them at newstands.

Oh, and here come the lawsuit threats again:

I do admit being surprised by the sheer creativity of their invented attacks, such as my supposed “pay for play” scheme. Let me be crystal clear. I deny that charge completely. I have stated the sources of my income and they do not include money from people asking me to shill for anyone or anything. Problem for these writers, is that the law doesn’t protect such defamation. The truth is an absolute defense to libel cases. If they have evidence for those smears, then they have nothing to fear. But if they, say, recklessly invented all manners of illegal or unethical activities by me without bothering to see if they bore any basis in truth, then they’ll have plenty to worry about.

The problem for YOU, Kos, is that the charge is that when ARMSTRONG gets paid (not you), you seem to get mighty cozy with endorsing the candidate that is paying him. How you’re going to make a defamation suit out of that is beyond me. But then again, I’m just some chump and you’re Kos…