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."

Exactly and he has lost.

"The simplest fact about American politics," he told me, "is that Republicans have a noise machine and we don't." Daily Kos, he decided, would become the Democratic noise machine

and by that pulled the Democrats into the sewer.

And Simon Rosenberg, the president of the centrist New Democratic Network (NDN), says that "frankly I don't think there's anyone who's had the potential to revolutionize the Democratic Party that Markos does." This great faith has put Moulitsas--an extremely smart, irascible, self-contradictory, often petty, always difficult, non-practicing attorney and web programmer with no real political experience--in the position of trying to understand, on the fly, what real power is and how it might be exercised, thrust him into a flailing, wild-eyed and bold solitary venture, trying to turn a website into a movement.

Not only does that sound like a dangerously wild-eyed solitary adventure, but the movement that is building turns against him. And I think rightfully so.

The site is for the true believers, not the aesthetes; its tone is harsh, impassioned, and frequently humorless.
And sometimes infantile and absurd. The site in recent months has become to seem like the site of some arcane political Thermidor with puzzled liberals being endlessly impaled upon pikes. In June 2003, after television cameras caught a cheering, thousand-strong mob in Fallujah dragging the charred, dismembered bodies of American contractors through the streets, Moulitsas linked to the reports and said of the contractors: "I feel nothing… Screw them."

Yep infantile and cruel at the same time. Kids can be like that.

"Scoop has the potential to revolutionize political participation," the NDN's Rosenberg told me. "The old model was that you used your body to take part in the political process--you drove voters to the polls, registered them. Markos's model is: You use your mind. You get to figure out what the party ought to be doing, you get to figure out what's wrong with the Bush administration, you get to be the intellectual. It's an infinitely more involving activity." Soon, Moulitsas's site had spawned eponymous new stars, well-read diarists who carried Moulitsas's crusades forward when he was otherwise engaged or asleep: Billmon, DavidNYC, Bill in Portland, Maine. If they were good--or outrageous--enough, he promoted them to the main site, allowing them to share space with him and exposing them to an audience that was growing by the tens of thousands.

It were only the "stars" he attracted and manipulated to the Front Page or away from it, that carried the site. Never his own writing. And that was very obvious.

When none of these things happened, there was a sense of incomprehension. All of Kos's confident predictions had been wrong. "It's a valid criticism. Looking back, I was too optimistic," Moulitsas told me. "[At] the beginning, I didn't even know what a margin of error was."

Did he go to college? Never had a basic statistic class? It's worse than I thought. I hadn't read much in the first years on the dailykos. But I always sensed something is not right. Markos used and in the later years abused the addictiveness of so called "spirited, noisy, splashy, cool" commenting and writing.

Moulitsas is touchy, far too self-assured, and easily provoked. But he's more interesting in person than he is on his blog, more thoughtful and funny and even a little bit more capable of self-criticism. He laughs, he makes fun of himself, he says absurd things and then takes them back, and then thinks again and doesn't--he actually enjoys himself. He told me a long story about egging on a blogger named Chris Bowers, who posts at MyDD.com, the same site where Moulitsas got his start. "I keep telling him, Chris, you've got to be an asshole, you're too soft for politics, the only way is to be an asshole, and you know what?" Moulitsas grins triumphantly. "He did. He's a lot tougher now."

Well only assholes would be proud of what he was saying. It's easy to make fun of yourself as a way to get away with "being the tough guy, who has no principles". He loved the hatemail he got. He used the hate mail to arouse feelings in the readers and enhance noise and division by posting the hate mail palooza. That's cheap, imo. Never could stand it. But from talking to kossacks in meet-ups I realized that people just loved that and thrived on them. That made me quite pensive and even more critical of his "tactics".

He paused for a minute, looking unusually non-agitated. "So the point is I know I have only a certain amount of time like this, and I'd like to make sure I do something useful with it."
The only nagging question is: What?

Apparently the usefulness is limited to noise diaries with the kind of bbb and BJ. So my nagging question is:
"What were you thinking you are doing, Markos?" I never came to the site for your writing, actually I thought it was horrible what you sometimes said. I came for the real journalists, who stood away from the noise (who you also used/abused as the ones who had to do the dirty work of "censoring" the people, who got too exited and upset in comments. Would have been much fairer to do THAT kind of work yourself. But in the end this is a "classy" site outsourcing the real work to those well-meaning and responsible writers ... pretty much for pennies on the dollar, I believe.

It so sad. I wonder what the same auther from the Washington Monthly would write today about the site.
And I regret to not have known more about the US and having discovered the EB so late.

so there is not reason to go anywhere else for this holiday. I hope you have a wonderful holiday too, smiley.