The recent dustup between The New Republic (or, as they apparently prefer to be called, THE NEW REPUBLIC) and DailyKos is interesting primarily as an example of the sort of blue-on-blue fratricide that liberal bloggers and liberal magazines profess to disdain.

Basically, to catch those up who probably don't otherwise care, former Virginia governor turned '08 hopeful Mark Warner hired Kos' friend and co-author Jerome Armstrong of myDD.com. Shortly thereafter, Warner showed up at the Vegas-hosted YearlyKos convention as a favored guest, much to the consternation of a number of Kos stalwarts (see here, here, and again here). This appears to have dovetailed with a previous incident in which Kos abruptly chose, last October, to endorse Sherrod Brown over blogosphere favorite Paul Hackett for the upcoming Ohio Senate race. At the time, Brown had hired Armstrong as a political consultant.

Now, this is something that ain't all nothin', as we folksily say down here in the South. There's certainly contextual evidence that Kos and Armstrong -- both of whom have never been terribly reticent in showing themselves to be ambitious in getting a foothold in Democratic party internal politics -- are using their blogophones to present themselves as online kingmakers to equally-ambitious Dem pols. Insofar as people expect bloggers, or at least these two bloggers, to be above the party fray (and who expects that?), this may be disappointing, but as far as political consultancy goes it's pretty small potatoes; Lieberman consultant Carter Eskew, for example, has spent years shilling for clients like Big Tobacco (when they were still insisting on the health-neutral effects of their products), Big Pharma (to protect its profits in Medicare Part D), and Big Broadcasting (to get spectrum without having to purchase it from the government) while also representing Democratic clients. Indeed, many of Eskew's commercials for his corporate clients soft-sell the Democratic party as well.

So far, the storyline is simple: Kos and Armstrong are using their online credibility to mobilize support for conservative (Warner) and conventional (Brown) Democratic candidates. (Warner, it should be noted, is even the beneficiary of Left Blogostan's nemesis, consultant Mudcat Saunders.) For those who pay attention to the tight complete graph of the DailyKos/myDD orbit, this is fairly interesting inside baseball. But then The New York Times and THE NEW REPUBLIC start to get involved. Chris Sullentrop, who has previously criticized Kos for his political work coexisting with his blogging, linked Kos' and Armstrong's political consulting to Armstrong's apparent past touting inflated Internet stocks. (Also see here.)

From there, TNR and Slate's Mickey Kaus were off to the races. TNR's Zengerle found a private e-mail from Kos asking liberal bloggers to "ignore this [story] for now" in order to "starve it of oxygen." He then followed it up with the (let's be honest, potentially libelous) allegation that Kos is threatening noncompliant blogs with financial ruin. "[A] lot of these blogs' financial health hinges upon staying in Kos's good graces. Is it any wonder they're so obedient?"

Now, Doxagora has never accepted advertising (and with the frequency of posts over the last year or so, few would offer). But had I known that I was missing out on a veritable cornucopia of cash, I would have joined Pajamas Media or Advertising Liberally long ago. Hell, I would have just posted kitten pictures all day had I known I was just burning money.

To be fair, TNR has been a money pit for, well, its entire existence (as are pretty much all political and policy magazines), but even so it should be obvious that bloggers aren't in it for the money: we do it because we're generally opinionated bastards with something (or just as often nothing) to say. Certainly some bloggers have tried to leverage their work into advertising networks or book contracts or, yes, political consultancies (and so the founder of RedState ended up in my latest copy of Campaigns and Elections giving blogcentric advice to campaign managers): but except for AmericaBlog's endless fundraising drives, Josh Marshall's burgeoning TPM empire, and a few journalists who use their blogs to actually finance real reportage, bloggers lose money on what they do, even with the $4.85 per month that something like Advertising Liberally brings in.

So.

Zengerle followed up his allegation with three e-mails allegedly lifted from the aforementioned mailing list. One, from Mike Stark of CallingAllWingnuts, expresses reservations about the situation and says that "I guess we can leave it to them to formulate a response. But they need to have one ready." The second, from lawyer and author Glen Greenwald, warns that "Terse denials and politician-like refusals to talk about it will, it seems clear to me, only inflame things further." But the third e-mail, from Steve Gilliard, seems to most strongly support Zengerle's thesis in that it calls for an active discussion of the issue: "I dont see how this can be ignored. We should all write in defense of this once we know the facts. Jerome?"

One problem: the Gilliard e-mail was a fake. Zengerle admitted that he was burned by the source, but refused to back down, citing "Armstrong's troubles with the SEC; Armstrong's relationship with Moulitsas and Moulitsas's pattern of supporting politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant; Moulitsas's attempts to silence liberal bloggers from commenting on these matters; the seeming acquiescence of so many of these liberal bloggers (including Greenwald) to Moulitsas's demands" and, in a bizarre attempt to throw as much chaff as possible in the air, Armstrong's evident belief in astrology.

Then things got really fun.

First, Kos responded, calling TNR "just another cog of the Vast RIGHT Wing Conspiracy ... mortally wounded and cornered, desperate for relevance." TNR owner Marty Peretz (who I have previously accused of incoherent ranting as editorial policy) sallied forth despite finding it "a bit demeaning to defend oneself against Kos." Kos is "illiterate ... just plain illiterate," writing "rant[s]" that "border[] on a nut case's." But this was a gentlemen's spat, complete with waving gloves, compared to the vitriol to come. Lee Siegel, the senior editor (how many senior editors does this magazine have?) who handles movie and television reviews, weighed in, not once but twice, in a remarkable effort to prove that Kos is not only rhetorically a fascist, but a literal fascist, the heir of El Mozote and the killers of Oscar Romero (evidently, when Siegel talks about the "fascistic forces ranged against Lieberman," he is saying that the Senator is in danger of being the victim of a new Shoah, or at least a Russian-style pogrom). He bases this on the fact that ... well, the fact that Kos lived in El Salvador when he was very young and evidently had no position on the Salvadoran civil violence at the time:

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. ... Even beyond the thuggishness, what I despise about so many blogurus, is the frivolity of their "readers." ... The blogosphere's fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus. ...

[F]anaticism ruled in the responses to what I wrote yesterday. ... [T]hese abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as "any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control." The proof, you might say, is in the puddingheads. I am overwhelmed by the intolerance and rage in the blogosphere. ... [I]nsults, personal attacks, and even threats ... truly [are] the stuff of thuggery and fascism.

Two other traits of fascism are its hatred of the processes of politics, and the knockabout origins of its adherents. Communism was hatched by elites. Fascism was born along the drifting paths of rootless men, often ex-soldiers who had fought in the First World War and been demobilized. [N.B.: Kos is a military vet. -tWB] They turned European politics into a madhouse of deracinated ambition.

Folks, take notes: that's how you do maddened invective! For someone who seems to give moral equivalence to bad names and Kristallnacht, Siegel is remarkably adept at the thuggery and fascism himself. (Though I would recommend that those still supporting Kos recognize, as Digby has, that they are following a veritable online Adolf, "a rootless former soldier looking for meaning in a stark post-modern landscape of internet cafes and shiny espresso carts." Beware!)

So, what's the upshot of this? First, TNR is engaging, consciously or not, in a bit of political triangulation: the war that it (and I) supported has dissolved into an ungovernable mess, bearing out the predictions of some of its opponents. Lieberman has, from a political perspective, become a burden to his own party, something that is evident even to the magazine that endorsed him for the 2004 Dem primary. Now Kos is touting conservative Warner and Peretz is (as he always has) championing Al Gore. Obviously, for TNR to arrive at an anti-Iraq War, anti-Lieberman, pro-Gore stance, it must show that it is still distanced from the, er, "madhouse of deracinated ambition" of the blogosphere. So political attacks are the order of the day. (Parenthetically, is Siegel supporting "politics without government?" Because that way lies Carl Schmitt, and just beyond that ... well, let's just leave that where it lies. I prefer not to charge others with fascist sympathies without direct evidence.)

I don't have any real political sympathies for Kos; in fact, my beliefs are often fairly closely aligned to those of TNR itself. But this whole imbroglio manages to place both sides in a dismal light, and suggests that TNR may have finally reached the point where it's simply direct competition for sites like DailyKos (something that the Washington Monthly, despite or perhaps because of its taking on Kevin Drum as blog-editor, has avoided). If so, it's as much dead meat as dead trees.