The current controversy

Another week, another blog controversy, and once again Hugh Hewitt is in the middle of it. This one deals with an alleged conflict of interest on the part of Daily Kos, and it’s been spread into the MSM by an article in the WSJ and into the nutcase media by Hugh Hewitt’s “Black Blog Ops” appearance on the O’Reilly show. Anybody who reads this site knows I’m anything but a fan of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. I once contributed to a left/right blog he set up to cover the last election, but quit when I sensed it wasn’t serving my interests. Not a fan at all. That being said, the allegation that Markos’ ties to the Dean Campaign were not adequately disclosed is every bit as much a load of crap as Hewitt’s attack on the MSM for reporting on the efforts by creationists to inject religion into biology classes in Pennsylvania. Anyone who read Kos on a regular basis during the election year knew he had ties to Dean, and anyone who’s read Kos even once knows he’s a Democratic Party activist and fund raiser. Hewitt is completely off base (once again) on this controversy and he’s got no business trying to pass himself off as some sort of authority on blogs for the purpose of flogging his own book on the O’Reilly show by helping the Falafel Man trash bloggers generally. Hewitt’s popularity is a testament to the rampant stupidity in American society. He’s a man of no insight, a panderer, and a wart on our democracy.

And don’t even get me started on O’Reilly, the only man in America capable of making Air America look good. Bloggers, especially those of us in the political center and to the right, had better realize who our friends are in this world. Self-promoters like Hewitt, O’Reilly, and Armstrong Williams are not among them.

Incidentally, the attempt by the ethically-challenged former gossip columnist Chris Nolan to reduce the Kos controversy into an inside-politics conspiracy to keep Dean out the Democratic Party chairmanship is no more persuasive than another tinfoil hat theory I’ve heard that right-wingers drummed it up for a similar reason or to take the heat off Williams. Zephyr Teachout raised the issue because she thinks it has important implications for blogging, and if you look at it closely it doesn’t incriminate Kos or Dean. Her thinking was just her thinking, so if anybody looks bad it’s mainly she, not Dean, Kos, or the Party.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Zephyr digs a deeper hole for herself. What a sad case that woman is.