If you want an instrument to measure how imperfectly the “MSM” reflects actual reality, look no further than the current media pile-on of Markos Moulitsas. Today David Brooks jumps in.

They say that the great leaders are gone and politics has become the realm of the small-minded. But in the land of the Lilliputians, the Keyboard Kingpin must be accorded full respect.

The Keyboard Kingpin, a k a Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way. And in this way the Kingpin has made himself a mighty force in his own mind, and every knee shall bow.

Oh yes, the Mighty Kos, who last Thursday was seen sitting quietly in the corner of the Lotus lounge while a roomful of rabid lambs debated the lamb business. “It’s not about me,” he responded, wistfully, to a question — I didn’t hear the question — and this lamb concurs. While I appreciate Kos’s skill at connecting blogging to the fleshly political world, I don’t actually read Kos all that much. No offense, Kos, but I don’t. On my list of blogs I try to read frequently Daily Kos comes in at about #20, meaning I don’t get to it more than once or twice a week.

Nor are Kos’s ideas accepted unquestioningly among bloggers. For example, among the many bloggers I’ve schmoozed with over the past month, including those at YearlyKos, I can testify there is considerable disinterest in a Mark Warner presidential bid in 2008. This is true even among those of us who went to the infamous Warner party in Las Vegas. And I can’t imagine any leftie blogger endorsing Warner just on Kos’s say so. That’s not how we do things here. As the Green Knight says,

First of all, Kos doesn’t have any followers. He has readers and co-bloggers, sure. But followers? Don’t be ridiculous. We’re talking about progressives, liberals, and Democrats here. You might as well try to herd cats as make people like us get in line.

The cluelessness of MSM pundits is one of the many public outrages that inspired a lot of us to get into blogging; blogging is, at least, more therapeutic than yelling at the TV. Watching and reading some of these bubble-wrapped wonders can be more frustrating than, well, herding cats. But now we have hard proof that their almighty opinions have all the substance of soufflé.

“Keyboard kingpin?” Puh-LEEZE.

It’s clear that elements among the punditocracy have been incited to take down these blogger people before they get too big for their britches. As Greg at The Talent Show says, “I’d love to get a peek at what’s been getting discussed on their private email list.”

However — and I’m speculating here — I wonder if the real target is Mark Warner and not Kos. After YearlyKos I thought it weird when the Warner party became the subject of much finger wagging, even though other politicians hosted parties for conference attendees. Wes Clark invited us all to a “do” at the Hard Rock Cafe, for example (I passed; I was too tired to go), and two or three congressional candidates held more modest cocktail parties. Yet Mark Warner’s party has been called out as if there were something sinister about a candidate inviting voters to some kind of shindig so he can shake their hands and kiss their babies. Not that I saw any babies at the Warner party, but I trust you get the point.

Where did the finger-wagging campaign originate? Why is the MSM suddenly piling on Kos this week? Is attacking Kos a back-door way of derailing candidates associated with Kos? Like Mark Warner? Or Sherrod Brown? Or Ned Lamont? Who is orchestrating this?

Today Newsweek is running a photo of Kos and Warner together on its web site; I assume the photo is in the print edition as well. And Newsweek reports on the 2004 Howard Dean internet campaign and the current challenge of Joe Lieberman as if these efforts were entirely Kos’s doing instead of the work of many blogs pulling together. As I said in an earlier post, Kos has become the physical manifestation of the blogosphere to people who don’t get blogging. Someone should explain to them that he’s only the tip of a very big iceberg.

In the two previous posts I’ve talked about the allegations of quid pro quo, some of which are absurd on their little red faces, and of the mysterious email that was allegedly written by Steve Gilliard, even though Steve says he has no record of writing it, and sent to the Townhall Townhouse listserv, even though no one on the listserv received it. Like the New Republic pundits before him, Brooks holds up the email as evidence of something without questioning its provenance. Way to go.

And these are the pros. These people have editors.

Brooks repeats allegations against Jerome Armstrong that in 2000 he was paid to tout a software stock on the web. The SEC is investigating this. I don’t claim to know what happened. But Brooks passes on the New Republic claim that Kos tried to shush discussion of the SEC story on the web, without noting that TAPPED did write about it. Some “kingpin.”

And Brooks tries to use these allegations to build an implication that Armstrong and Kos are nothing more than old-style influence peddlers. For the other side, which Brooks ignores, see Ezra Klein.

Now, if I were the Democrats, I’d be coming to the support of the blogosphere, because as I say I’m not persuaded Kos and bloggers are the real targets here. And Brooks should be ashamed of himself for passing on smears without bothering to check facts. But then, he’s only a vegetable.

See also Raw Story, James Wolcott, Tbogg, and Shakespeare’s Sister.

The owners of The New Republic must’ve ordered a hit on Markos Moulitsas. Following up the Zengerle v. Kos dispute, another TNR columnist, Lee Siegel, wrote on Thursday defending “Zengerle’s artful and honest exposure of someone who, more and more, seems to represent the purest, most classical strain of hypocrisy.” That’s Kos, I guess. Siegel goes on to fire buckshot at the whole leftie blogosphere —

It’s a bizarre phenomenon, the blogosphere. It radiates democracy’s dream of full participation but practices democracy’s nightmare of populist crudity, character-assassination, and emotional stupefaction. It’s hard fascism with a Microsoft face. It puts some people, like me, in the equally bizarre position of wanting desperately for Joe Lieberman to lose the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont so that true liberal values might, maybe, possibly prevail, yet at the same time wanting Lamont, the hero of the blogosphere, to lose so that the fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman might be defeated. (Every critical event in democracy is symbolic of the problem with democracy.)

So if people use the internets to organize a political challenge to Lieberman, that makes us “fascistic forces”? Why doesn’t that make us “participants in representative democracy”?

And yes, the blogosphere gets a little rough, but I say most of us are genteel compared to rightie talk radio.

Siegel must’ve caught some attitude for the Thursday column, because yesterday he posted on “The Origins of Bloggofascism.”

“Moron”; “Wanker” (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and “Asshole” have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a “conservative.” Another resourceful adversarialist invited me to lick his scrotum. Please send a picture and a short essay describing your favorite hobbies. One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door–I’m too polite to mention any names–even asked who it was at TNR who gave me “the keys to a blog.”

Poor baby.

For the record, in the past I’ve blogged about digital lynch mobs and why people should learn to express disagreement without suggesting the person disagreed with should go bleep his mother. This is for the disagree-er’s own sake as well as for the sake of the disagree-ee. As I wrote here,

Anger is a tricky thing. It can motivate people, but it can also repel. I wrote last week, for example, that antiwar protests are more effective when protesters are serious but not angry. That’s because people who are not angry at the same things you are will be uncomfortable with your anger. If you want to persuade people to see your point of view, it helps to do it in a not-angry way.

However,

Blogging, on the other hand, is not about persuasion as much as it is about peeling away layers of socially conditioned bullshit to get at bare-bones truth. A good blogger is an honest blogger. I’d say to any blogger that if you’re angry, dig into yourself to find the source of your anger and blog it. Don’t worry about what the neighbors will think.

Saturday I quoted Sam Keen;

Honor your anger. But before you express it, sort out the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm, the water is muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to discriminate, for the mud to settle. But once the stream runs clear, express your outrage against any who have violated your being. Give the person you intend to love the gift of discriminating anger.

Poor Seigel got blasted with some indiscriminate rage, which is unpleasant, but it’s hardly fascism. Juvenile, probably. Pissed off, definitely. But pissed off doesn’t add up to fascism.

Seigel complains about “abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism” — i.e., somebody called him a “wanker.” And calling him a wanker is fascism, he says, because his dictionary defines fascism as “any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control.” I’m not sure how being called a “wanker” reduces a person to severe autocratic or dictatorial control, but I’ll let that pass.

Seigel’s definition of fascism is a poor definition. Per David Neiwert,

In today’s context, Nazism specifically and fascism generally are most often cited by partisans of both sides not with any reference to its actual content but merely as the essence of totalitarian evil itself. This is knee-jerk half-thought. Obviously, I don’t agree that the mere reference to fascism, let alone a serious discussion of it, automatically renders a point moot. But a reflexive, ill-informed or inappropriate reference — which describes the bulk of them — should suffice to invalidate any argument.

Gotcha, Siegel.

Then, after further whining about the “intolerance and rage” in the blogosphere, Siegel continues to express intolerance and rage against Kos and the blogosphere.

“Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents,” he says, and then he pulls a quote from Kos out of a San Francisco Chronicle article that begins —

“I believe in government. I was in El Salvador in the late ’70s during the civil war and I saw government as a life-and-death situation,” he said. “There was no one to root for. The government was a corrupt plutocracy and the rebels were Maoists. The concept of government is important.”

Kos said he saw bullets flying and soldiers executing guerrillas, and his father told him all this violence was “politics.” Which, Siegel says, proves that Kos hates politics. But the quote says nothing of the sort; Siegel performed some cognitive acrobatics worthy of Cirque du Soleil to pull “Kos hates politics” out of the Chronicle article. And having observed Kos in a political habitat, I can testify he appeared to be having a good time.

Seigel, increasingly unhinged, drew more illogical inferences from the Chronicle quote:

So he loves government, but hates politics. There’s something chilling about that. I wonder, does Zuniga consider the Solidarity movement disgusting, compromising, venal politics, too? And was there really no one to root for during the Salvadoran civil war? It’s hard to believe the usually inflexibly partisan Zuniga actually said that. The rebels may have been “Maoist”–whatever that meant to them in Central America at the time–but their goal of overthrowing a brutal, rapacious regime might well be something that a passionate political idealist and reformer like Zuniga, looking back at it in 2004, would sympathize with. Or so you would think.

Lordy, Siegel, Kos was a little kid in the 1970s, and he was just explaining why government (as opposed to instability and anarchy) is important to him. Out of this Siegel constructs a straw Kos-ideology and calls it “chilling.” But seems to me that most Americans would agree that a choice between Maoist guerrillas and brutal, rapacious plutocrats leaves one with “no one to root for.” In the real world, often there really is no one to root for other than the innocents who get in the way of other people’s agendas. Think Iraq.

Siegel continues,

But, then, Zuniga–let’s cut the puerile nicknames of “DailyKos, “Atrios,” “Instapundit” et al., which are one part fantasy of nom de guerres, one part babytalk, and a third thuggish anonymity–believes so deafeningly and inflexibly that it’s hard to tell what he believes at all, expecially if you try to make out his conviction over the noisy bleating of his followers.

In other words, Siegel is so enraged that he is reduced to calling us bloggers “morons,” “wankers,” and “assholes,” albeit with a fancier vocabulary. At least he isn’t calling us “conservatives.”

Kos is catching heat now because he has become the physical manifestation of blogging to people who don’t “get” blogging. As I’ve said before, Kos is a great organizer who deserves credit for what he’s achieved in and out of the blogosphere. But I don’t know of any bloggers who think of him as a “our leader.” Those of us with our own blogs (which is most of the leftie blogosphere) are our own bloggers. We don’t look to Kos to tell us what to think, and we don’t always agree with him. DailyKos is a high-traffic site because it’s a huge community with a wealth of good bloggers and diarists and constantly changing content, not because we all click in to receive the wisdom of Kos.

Just wait til Siegel and the rest of the New Republic wankers figure out that they’re not fighting a cult of Kos. They’re fighting a movement of independent thinkers who now have the means to speak out. The wankers can’t control the message any more.

Poor babies.