Redstate

By QueenOfCups Posted in Blogosphere — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I have uncovered the biggest Right Wing Conspiracy Theory EVER:

Kos is a undercover VRWC agent conservative sent forth by Karl Rove to destroy Clinton's ascendancy to the White House. Perhaps even the entire liberal movement! Take a deep breath, let it sink in and reread that line. Yes, indeed, all the pieces have come together and the plot is revealed! Examine the evidence and judge for yourself.

Exhibit #1: Kos has managed to gather together in one place all the Barking Moonbats.

Exhibit #2: O'Reilly is drawing attention to them by inviting viewers to survey the horrors for themselves.

Exhibit #3: Excerpts from an article I found just this morning from Washington Monthly January, 2006. These excerpts are long, but really telling.

“I hate Washington," says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga… When Moulitsas says Washington, he's not talking about Bush's Washington with its pitched partisan camps and pay-to-play ethos. He's talking about Democratic Washington: the liberal Ivy League mandarins, consultants, and wonks, many of them refugees from the Clinton administration, insiders whom he believes have run the Democratic Party and the progressive movement into the ground, by valuing compromise over confrontation. To him, it's not that these people have the wrong values or priorities. It's that they are failures. Moulitsas's career to this point has been a bet that enough other people share this very precise, nearly sub-articulate animus. I hate Washington. And yet there he was, just after the 2004 elections, in the ornate Lyndon B. Johnson room of the capitol where he'd been invited to give Senate Democrats a post mortem on what went wrong.

He is so clever, exploiting the liberal “why don’t they like me, please like me” insecurities.

This record, combined with the sheer vigor and clarity of his online manifestos, has brought Moulitsas, a 34-year-old Californian whom nobody had heard of until three years ago, to the attention of the Democratic establishment, first as a resented adversary and now, increasingly, a kind of part-time sage, an affiliate member. [How dastardly clever is that?] Every third week, Moulitsas has a standing phone call with congressional powerbroker Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-Ill.), and he talks regularly with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). [I believe it is weekly now that he has won their confidence!] In part, this is raw flattery, a way for Democratic politicians to keep a particularly shrill irritant [good cover!] off their own backs while simultaneously reaching out to his audience, the party's young, liberal, professional grassroots. But it's not just an empty gesture. Moulitsas has become so well incorporated into the party machinery that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) uses him to recruit candidates. "They get calls from, like John Edwards, and maybe Tom Vilsack, and then, always, Markos," one DCCC staffer told me. This legacy has made him the current champion of that wing of the Democratic Party--anti-war, deeply partisan, young, mostly white, and professional--that seemed ascendant in the year before the first Democratic primaries in 2004. Deanism, in Moulitsas's hands, in an unending belief in the triumphal capacities of the right kind of theatrics, the importance not just of saying the right things, but of saying them with an uncompromising zeal, and gut, and feeling.

Again, capitalizing on the Liberal need for feeeeeeeeeling over sound policies or values.

The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic Party in which Moulitsas calls the shots would cater to every whim of its liberal base. But though he can match Michael Moore for shrillness, the most salient thing about Moulitsas's politics is not where he falls on the left-right spectrum (he's actually not very far left)[Of COURSE he's not!]. It's his relentless competitiveness, founded not on any particular set of political principles, but on an obsession with tactics --and in particular, with the tactics of a besieged minority, struggling for survival: stand up for your principles, stay united, and never back down from a fight. "They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," Moulitsas told me, "I'm just all about winning."

How interesting is that? Winning what, I wonder? But wait, it gets even MORE interesting:

After high school, Moulitsas, then a Reagan Republican thanks largely to the White House's support of the Salvadorean government, spent four years as an army artillery scout, mainly in Germany. He had begun to gravitate leftwards while in the military--its diversity had incubated in him a kind of nascent identity politics liberalism--and when he was discharged and enrolled at Northern Illinois University, he became active in campus politics, writing a column for the school paper and helping to lead the college's Hispanic student group.

A Reagan Republican, eh? I ask you brothers and sisters, does anyone ever go back, short of a severe blow to the head resulting in amnesia? It reminds me of the religious debates over the ability to lose one's salvation. The plot thickens:

The ideology of winnerism - His most curious crusade of all was the one he began in late August of 2005, when he declared on his site that he had a secret plan to destroy the Democratic Leadership Council. A few years ago, when the organization of Democratic centrists was backing the invasion of Iraq and flirting with Social-Security privatization, this might have made sense. But by last year, the DLC had begun loudly denouncing Bush, particularly for his handling of Iraq, and was generally in agreement with Moulitsas and the party's activist base on a broad range of issues. Moulitsas, for his part, had spent the previous few months focused on taking on the liberal interest groups, urging Democrats to run more pro-life candidates, and to contest rural contests with rural values--all long-held tenets of the DLC. So Moulitsas's beef with the group wasn't over ideology, it was, predictably, over tactics. But even here, the ire seemed misplaced: The DLC is hardly averse to a strategy that puts winning ahead of ideological purity--it helped make its reputation in the early '90s by advising Bill Clinton to adopt just that kind of pragmatism, arguing that electoral victory was more important than philosophical correctness.

Still, Moulitsas wouldn't back down. "No calls for a truce will be brooked," he wrote. "Appeals to party unity will fall on deaf ear… We need to make the DLC radioactive. And we will. With everyone's help, we really can. Stay tuned." As the countdown continued, Moulitsas posted millennial-sounding attacks on the DLC that veered, like the writings of the Ayatollahs, between the merely portentous and the outright ludicrous. Some liberal websites, ecstatic, began speculating about what Moulitsas's plan might be; others posted count-down clocks. And then…nothing. Three days before the scheduled unveiling, Moulitsas wrote that he'd changed his mind. Hurricane Katrina, which had just struck, had made him realize, he said, that this was not the time for intra-party bickering. "We think someone got to him," a DLC staffer told me darkly.

Delayed, but not cancelled as evidenced by the recent flap that the Dem candidates skipped the DLC but attended YKos

The younger-than-35 liberal professionals who account for most of his audience seem an ideologically satisfied group, with no fundamental paradigm--changing demands to make of the Democratic Party. They don't believe strongly, as successive generations of progressives have, that the Democratic Party must develop more government programs to help the poor, or that racial and ethnic minorities are wildly underrepresented, or that the party is in need of a fundamental reform towards the pragmatic center--or at least they don't believe so in any kind of consistent or organized manner. As this generation begins to move into positions of power within the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, they don't pose much of a challenge on issues or substance. So the tactical critique takes center stage.

It really is true, they have no leadership plan! They have no idea how to really govern - like the hippies they represent they only know how to oppose "the man." This explains the Dems preoccupation with endless going-nowhere hearings - what did Reid say? 100 and maybe 100 more? On Iraq alone? Sheesh!

Moulitsas's sensibility suits his generation perfectly. But it also comes with a built-in cost. Moulitsas is just basically uninterested in the intellectual and philosophical debates that lie behind the daily political trench warfare. By his own admission, he just doesn't care about policy. It's here that the correlation between sports and politics breaks down. In sports, as Vince Lombardi is said to have put it, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." When the season is over, you hang up your cleats and wait for the next season. But in politics, that's not the case--you have to govern, and if you don't govern well, you won't get reelected. So while tactics and message are crucial, most voters will ultimately demand from politicians ideas that give them a sense of what a party is going to do once in power. Wanting to win very badly is an admirable and necessary quality in politics, and Moulitsas is right that Democrats have needed it in greater quantity. But it is not really a political philosophy.

That's not Moulitsas's fault, of course. He doesn't pretend to be a policy wonk. But the more that the Democratic Party turns to Moulitsas for help, the more the limits to his movement become apparent, the less the raw animus of many liberals for the Iraq war seems likely to translate into any lasting liberal movement, and the more the current obsession with his brand of Winnerism looks misplaced. Moulitsas's great aspiration has been to make the Democratic grassroots as disciplined, directed, and on-message as any whip would want his party in Congress to be. "But at some point someone's going to have to step up and say, okay, this is where the party's got to go," Ed Kilgore, a prominent Democratic strategist and longtime member of the DLC, told me recently. [is this a real person, or a literary reference to Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout? I wonder.] "And right now it still feels awfully up for grabs."

"All he really wants is not to be president, or governor, or have statues built for him," one of his friends told me, "but maybe to help run the DCCC, to help Democrats win, and to have been right."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.wallace-wells.html

AHA! To have been right? Or to have been Right? As in VRWC????? He is an Evil Genius, taking them down from the inside, piece by piece starting with the house that Clintons built! Which leads me to…

Exhibit #4: Thanks, Moe, for alerting me to the final piece of evidence:

The Fix Is In: The Big Lie and the 2008 GOP Strategy Aug 3 posting on Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/3/95325/65672

And to think I have never been a big believer in conspiracy theories – if ONLY we were that organized. Well, now, much to my surprise and delight – we are!