On Fox News Sunday yesterday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol attacked the upcoming YearlyKos convention and its namesake, DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, as out of the mainstream and “not respectable.”
ThinkProgress, DailyKos, and other progressive blogs responded to Kristol’s baseless charges, pointing out that what Kristol describes “as left is now center” and that the viewpoints of the progressive blogosphere reflect mainstream America.
On the Weekly Standard’s blog today, Sonny Bunch defended his boss by going on the attack, recalling a brusque comment Markos made in 2004, for which he has apologized:
The Daily Kos, Think Progress, and a host of other lefty blogs seem to be shocked that someone might question the respectability of Markos Moulitsas…Is that the kind of thing respectable people say?
ThinkProgress has created a compilation of the highly-esteemed rhetoric of Bill Kristol, presumably the type of language Bunch considers emulatable:
– “It is insane for this country to be obsessing … about a small prisoner abuse scandal,” referring to Abu Ghraib. [5/16/2004]
- “Cheney’s statement” that Ned Lamont’s primary victory helps al Qaeda “is indisputably correct.” [6/13/2006]
- “The voters in Florida, I guess, who elected him” are responsible for former Rep. Mark Foley’s illicit sexual behavior. “Maybe they should have known better.” [10/3/06]
- Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is “sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858″ in appeasing slave owners. [2/10/07]
- Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) saying the war is lost “is much more disgraceful than anything Trent Lott said” about the country being better off if it had maintained racist segregation policies. [4/22/07]
Bunch seems to consider such commentary to be “the kind of thing respectable people say.”
UPDATE: Atrios notes:
Over the next couple of weeks there will be a grand effort by the wingosphere/conservative pundits/Falafel boy/their mainstream media enablers/etc… to try to undermine Yearly Kos and to marginalize anyone who attends.
UPDATE II: In the Washington Post last week, David Corn laid out Kristol’s less-than -”respectable” record as a shill for the Iraq war.
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