Holding out for a zero
By Jay Tea on Blogosphere
Wizbang
I think I'm going to engage in a bit of "armchair psychology" here. But first, let me spell out my qualifications:
1) I once took a single course in psychology.
2) I know very little about the subject of this piece, reading his work very occasionally.
3) Most of what I know about him is what his detractors say.
4) To refer to this as "rampant speculation" would be slanderous to rampant speculators.
OK, with that out of the way, let me delve into the psyche of one Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the guy who runs (sort of) Daily Kos. This is prompted by his latest lurch into looniness, his vow to destroy the Democratic Leadership Council in two weeks.
Now, let's take a look at some background here. Kos is not just a blogger. He has a "day job" at Media Matters, and he has a sideline of political consulting as well. Kos has endorsed and/or worked for 16 candidates, and those 16 candidates all share the distinction of having lost. Further, his campaign to get Karl Rove to resign after his speech to the New York Conservative Party went exactly nowhere.
I'm starting to wonder if Kos is addicted to losing. If he has this tremendous lack of self-esteem, and feels the need to reinforce his sense of inferiority by constantly latching himself to losing causes and doomed agendas.
Let's look at this purely objectively. On the one hand, we have Kos and his track record of consistently losing elections. On the other hand, we have the Democratic Leadership Council.
Out of the last 10 Presidential elections, the Democrat has won exactly three times. The first was Jimmy Carter in 1976. But let's face it -- with the stink of Watergate still hanging over the Republicans, Lyndon Johnson probably could have defeated Gerald Ford, even factoring in the handicap of Johnson having been dead for nearly four years at that point.
The only other two Democratic victories were with Bill Clinton, a product of the DLC. I'm not aware of Kos spending much time attacking Clinton's administration or record, but again I don't read him that much.
So, here we have a group that, somehow, actually managed to get a Democrat elected president. So, what does that mean? THEY MUST BE DESTROYED! Kos sounds an awful lot like how a lot of the left depict Karl Rove here.
So Kos says that, in two weeks, he will announce his Great Plan to destroy the DLC. Further, he spells out the theme of his attack -- smearing and besmirching them, rendering them so "radioactive" that no one will dare touch them or be around them.
Threats are stupid things. Detailed threats are even dumber. Detailed threats with deadlines are quite possibly the dumbest thing since "hey, what a cool statue of a horse our enemies left us! Bring it in here!"
I see two likely outcomes to Kos' little threat. The first is that, at the last minute, he will "allow" himself to be dissuaded from unleashing his vast powers and turning the DLC into a smoking, glowing ruin. Instead, he will announce a new "alliance" where he will work with them to elect a Democrat in 2008 -- the "alliance" consisting of Kos making a few gestures, and the DLC saying polite things and making vague noises of gratitude while paying a voodoo priestess vast sums of money to keep the Kos Kampaign Kurse from claiming yet another victim. A pity that Miss Cleo is out of business.
That's one outcome. Another would be that Kos will go back and delete the threat and pretend it never happened. That's his modus operandi -- it's what he did when he looked at the slaughtered American contractors whose bodies were strung up from a bridge in Fallujah. Kos, as you might recall (I bet he doesn't), called them "mercenaries" and proclaimed "screw them." It was only after he started losing serious ad money and consulting contracts that he issued a half-assed apology, then deleted every trace he could get his hands on that he had ever said it.
No matter what happens, though, one outcome is guaranteed: vast entertainment for a lot of people. I think I'm gonna nuke up some popcorn and enjoy this show.
Update: Cousin Oliver points out in the comments that he, not Kos, blogs for bucks for Media Matters. Kos is a free-lance whore, not an in-house prostitute. My apologies for the error.
So, if that's the extent of your corrections, Oliver, may I presume the rest remains unchallenged?
Update 2: Note to self: the quickest way to get a response from Cousin Oliver is to discuss his finances, apparently. I guess it really is all about the Benjamins.
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