A response to the Kossacks

Because the Palmer Report cited my work on Boris Ephsteyn (even though I'm right about him), I was smeared today in a comment published in Daily Kos:

Be wary of any story that uses Joseph Cannon as a source. He was one of the idiots pushing the “Whitey tape” nonsense in 2008. He also claimed Barack Obama was a CIA agent.

Kos won't allow me to respond to this smear. (Maybe it was the insulting cartoons I did of Markos Moulitsas? I kinda made his lips look like bananas.) Here's the response that they would not publish:

* * *

Am I allowed to defend myself against this smear? I took Larry Effing Johnson (the source for that "Whitey" claim) seriously — for a while — for two reasons: 1. He was a regular writer for Daily Kos. 2. He was a friend to Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. When Johnson pointed to a specific speech at which Michelle Obama supposedly uttered that smear, I spent many (as in many) hours trying to track down someone who was in that room on that occasion. When I found out that Johnson lied, I understood, belatedly, his snake-in-the-grass nature, and we’ve been enemies ever since.

So it is fairer to say that I exposed the lie. I also learned not to trust someone's liberal bona fides simply because he or she wrote for Kos.

Yes, I still believe that Obama was working for the American intelligence community when he made that mysterious trip to Pakistan in 1981. If the evidence here is not enough to make the idea seem at least possible, then we must disagree.

But if you want to talk about weird, “out there” claims, may I remind you that during this same period (the 2008 campaign) Daily Kos published a fake news story — endorsed by Moulitsas himself — which claimed that Hillary doctored a video to make Obama’s face look darker? I was hardly the only writer to expose that particular lie.

May I also remind you of another incident from 2008? Austan Goolsbee (at Obama’s behest) visited Canada to tell officials privately that Obama was fibbing about his anti-NAFTA stance. After Goolsbee was exposed, a Daily Kos writer published a fake news story claiming that it was Hillary who did what Obama actually did. This fake Kos story led to a official Canadian investigation which exonerated Hillary. Remember that?

May I remind you that Kos was an absolute cesspool of anti-Clinton hatred and prevarication at that time? May I remind you that Kos published actual, serious death threats against Hillary Clinton (as I documented in many articles — hell, the original Kos pages are probably still up)?

May I remind you that throughout 2008, the pages of Daily Kos were filled with every inane anti-Clinton conspiracy theory imaginable?

2008 was a difficult year, but I’ll happily match my record against that of the Daily Kos. Kos writers simply have no moral right to accuse me of writing over-the-top material. The way Kossacks acted throughout that period was worse than shameful: It was downright abominable. An unthinking, paranoid mob mentality overtook the entire site.

Also, may I remind you that I was THE first writer to discuss the Trump/Russia connection in a long piece that name-checked Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Carter Page? The piece predicted that the “Russia factor” would lead to a Trump victory. This was published on June 16, 2016 — months before Manafort left the Trump campaign, more than a month before other writers (not to mention the FBI) began to pay attention. At the time, most Kos readers would have pooh-poohed the notion.