CIA Bloggers for Hillary
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by Richard Poe Monday, January 28, 2008 12:00 am Eastern Time |
Archives 4 Comments |
A Four-Part Series CIA Bloggers for Hillary, January 28, 2008 Why Liberals Love the CIA, February 5, 2008 How the CIA Lost Vietnam, February 13, 2008 Walter Cronkite and the CIA, February 26, 2008 |
DEMOCRAT BLOGGER Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga never fails to bewilder. He proclaims his humble origins, yet his family is rich. He heckles Hillary Clinton, yet helps her where it counts. He boasts of completing a six-month screening for CIA employment — but says he turned down the job for no very good reason.
His fans call him “Kos”. His DailyKos blog draws more than half a million visits per day, reportedly generating sufficient advertising revenue to support the Kos family in style.
Kos’ followers — called “Kossacks” — include over 125,000 registered users and hundreds of “diarists” or bloggers, five of them paid “fellows”.
Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are all DailyKos diarists.
Hillary Clinton spoke at the 2007 YearlyKos Convention, where she told the Kossacks, “We are… putting together a network in the blogosphere… we’re beginning to match… the advantage of the other side.”
The Washington Post touts Kos as the Democrat answer to Rush Limbaugh.
How did the 36-year-old Kos attain such lofty status?
Moulitsas presents himself as a self-made man. He told the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica:
“Before the Internet, someone like me could never have reached this level of success. I have no money. I don’t come from a famous or powerful family.”
Baloney, says Francis L. Holland, a disaffected Kossack who runs the Truth-About-Kos Web site.
Kos was born in Chicago on September 11, 1971 to a Greek father, Markos Moulitsas, Sr., and a Salvadoran mother, María Teresa Zúñiga de Funes.
Holland notes that an uncle of Kos served as El Salvador’s Education Minister. His mother’s family owns the Club Joya del Pacifico, a Salvadoran resort. Another Kos relative, Carlos Alberto Delgado Zúñiga, owns the Baja Salt Group, a global supplier of industrial and table salt.
Kos’ parents took him to El Salvador in 1976. They stayed for four years.
Political violence was on the rise. President Carlos Humberto Romero began cracking down on communist insurgents in 1977. This upset U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who sought to appease the guerrillas, not fight them.
Carter backed a gang of leftwing colonels and politicians calling themselves the Revolutionary Government Junta (Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno). They ousted President Romero on October 15, 1979, promising land reform and nationalization of major industries.
Carter’s “revolution” only emboldened the communists. In 1980, the country exploded in civil war. Kos’ family fled the country that year when communist guerrillas threatened to kill them.
Kos joined the U.S. Army after high school. From 1989-92, he served as a 13P missile crew specialist in Bamberg, Germany. Kos says that the racial diversity of the Army awakened his inner Latino, transforming him from a Reagan Republican to a hard-left Democrat.
Bolstered by racial pride, Kos earned two bachelors’ degrees from Northern Illinois University and a law degree from Boston University. He moved to San Francisco in 1998, seeking his fortune in the dot-com boom.
Then, one day, Kos decided to join the CIA. “In 2001, I was underemployed… between jobs… And so I applied to the CIA,” Kos said in a June 2, 2006 interview. Kos was amazed to find that his CIA interviewers shared his leftwing views. He recalls:
“Every single one of them was liberal… people who want to make the world a better place… people who are internationalist… That was an eye-opening experience for me.”
After six months, the CIA offered him an assignment with its Clandestine Service. But Kos said no. “The Howard Dean campaign took off and I had to make a decision,” he explains. Kos chose politicking over spying. Or so he says.
Curiously, Kos joined the Dean campaign in June 2003, more than a year after his CIA interlude supposedly ended. His story is fishy. But, then, so is everything else about Mr. Moulitsas.
Kos founded DailyKos on May 26, 2002. He positioned himself as a renegade, “crashing the gate” of the Democratic Party.
Yet he acts more like a gatekeeper than a gatecrasher. Following Hillary’s victory in the New Hampshire primary, for instance, Kos squashed speculation that she might have cheated. “Anyone who persists in this crap is engaging in unsupported conspiracy theories and violating site policy, a bannable offense”, Kos announced.
Some leftist bloggers have denounced Kos as a government plant. “Once CIA, always CIA”, says Francis Holland.
Any statement Kos makes should arouse healthy skepticism. Still, his account of a “liberal”, “internationalist” CIA rings true, given the brazen defiance President Bush has endured from that agency.
A Four-Part Series CIA Bloggers for Hillary, January 28, 2008 Why Liberals Love the CIA, February 5, 2008 How the CIA Lost Vietnam, February 13, 2008 Walter Cronkite and the CIA, February 26, 2008 |
See reader comments at FreeRepublic.com:
Posted on 01/29/2008 2:45:00 PM PST
Kos is definitely CIA. Look at his position on 9/11. If anyone so much as mentions that freefall rate “collapses” logically infer that the solid vast majority of a building would be offering no more resistance than air (thus, impossible without explosives, thus 9/11 had to have been an inside job) they get immediately banned. Why? Because unless you regurgitate the impossible, far-fetched myth of the “nineteen hijackers with boxcutters” then you’re a threat to everything that Kos is there for. He’s a left gatekeeper, just like Bill Maher, just like Michael Moore, just like Amy Goodman etc. They are part of the right wing’s effort to control “both sides” of any debate.