nutroots eat their own

Daily Kos Posters Berated by Founder for being Gullible Fools
By P.J. Gladnick | September 3, 2007 - 14:36 ET
How pathetic are the posters on a large blog when its own founder berates them for being gullible fools for being easily scammed by an obviously phony story? Such was the case with the posters on the favorite "progressive" blog of the MSM, the Daily Kos, when its founder, Markos Moulitsas, tore into them for being suckers because they fell for a story about a supposed imminent U.S. invasion of Iran based on the fantasies of a blogger with a history of fabulist tall tales. To add insult to injury, Moulitsas even cited a "rightwing" blog to discredit the thread posted by Daily Kos blogger Maccabee who originated the Iran invasion fantasy:

Seriously, just because something online confirms your own viewpoint or prejudices or whatnot, it does not mean it's true.

Skepticism is a virtue.

Now the right-wingers are laughing at the gullibility of those who recommend Maccabee's diaries.

And they are quite justified in doing so.


The "rightwing" blog cited by Moulitsas was joshua.treviño.at which exposed the rather low veracity of Daily Kos poster Maccabee:

It’s no surprise that there are serial liars and embellishers on the interwebs. What should be noted is that their lies and embellishments can be utterly transparent and repetitive, and yet be accepted as fact time and again by the audience for whom they confirm basic prejudices. Take, for example, one pseudonymous fellow at DailyKos who goes by “Maccabee.” He claimed to meet a Romanian cabbie who told him to leave Bush’s tyrannical America; he claimed to meet a Holocaust survivor who told him that Bush’s America resembles Nazi Germany; he claimed to meet another cabbie, Ugandan this time, who told him that Bush’s America is worse than Idi Amin’s Uganda; he claimed to have received a phone call from Balad, Iraq, revealing that the majority of the American Army’s mechanized strength is “out of commission”; and today, he claimed to have received a telephone call from an American aircraft carrier on deployment, revealing that the United States Navy is about to attack Iran. Oh, and he also learned that the naval rank and file detest George W. Bush, too. That “Maccabee” is a habitual liar is obvious enough: what’s more ridiculous than his fables is that they are nearly always Recommended Diaries at DailyKos. The reality-based community loves its myths — and its mythmakers.


Not surprisingly, many posters on the Daily Kos who were taken in by Maccabee's scam were not pleased with being denounced as gullible laughingstocks by Moulitsas. Here is a sampling of their angry responses:

maybe markos is really karl rove.


I was bamboozled into rec'ing that diary and now feel really used!

Gee, it's all a bit much and roundabout and blaming the victim, when the great god Kos and frontpagers in the know could simply disappear the troll diary, or ban the troll diarist.

If you knew it from the beginning then, damn it, why didn't you bring it up at the beginning? And if you didn't know it from the beginning then don't pretend that you did. And if you've got any administrative abilities, ban the person in question and just say "gosh we were taken in for a while, but we've got it now!" and be done with it.

Is the ONLY evidence that Maccabee's diary is fraudulent a post from a conservative blogger??? If so I see absolutely no reason to consider the diary fraudulent, and find this post by Markos an offensive attack on the community. It is repugnant that he would take a conservative's word over that of his own community. If there is more evidence, hard evidence, then I'll retract the above statements.


You can see a more complete collection of both irked and inadvertently funny Kossack replies to Moulitsas' charge of gullibility at the DUmmie FUnnies.