**WARNING** Expletives contained in this article!
Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas allowed the publication of underage girls’ identities on his blog in an attempt to vilify Andrew Breitbart and exonerate New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner. Tommy Christopher, an openly left-wing journalist at Mediaite, /www.mediaite.com/online/andrew-breitbart-did-not-run-weinergate-evidence-which-turned-out-to-be-fabricated/">http://www.mediaite.com/o...ed-out-to-be-fabricated/" style="color: rgb(0, 88, 166); text-decoration: none; ">reported Friday morning that Moulitsas’s site published personally identifiable information about two young women who have become somewhat involved in the #Weinergate scandal.
Christopher refers to the two 16-year-old girls as “Betty” and “Veronica” in order to protect their identities. Christopher said Betty approached him on Sunday with information about how Dan Wolfe or @PatriotUSA76, would regularly harass Weiner and young women who follow the congressman on Twitter. Betty never wanted to be a public part of the story.
Betty’s friend Veronica then approached Christopher with a made-up story about Weiner sending her lewd pictures on Twitter. Several conservative Twitter users, such as Wolfe and @GoatsRed (Mike Stack), had been encouraging people to come forward with such stories. But Christopher told TheDC that no one was asked to lie and Veronica’s story was not published before being debunked. Daily Kos bloggers, however, alleged that the conservative Twitter users were soliciting false stories about Weiner.
Christopher writes in his story that these Kos bloggers were able to track down Betty and Veronica based on clues left behind in his Twitter feed. Christopher contacted Moulitsas to ask him to stop publication of information that could be used to identify the young girls. An /www.mediaite.com/online/andrew-breitbart-did-not-run-weinergate-evidence-which-turned-out-to-be-fabricated/4/">http://www.mediaite.com/o...-out-to-be-fabricated/4/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(0, 88, 166); text-decoration: none; ">email back-and-forth between Christopher and Moulitsas shows the two liberals disagreeing on whether or not the young girls’ identities should be published. Christopher told TheDC he’s “really livid” with Moulitsas’s actions.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” Christopher said of Moulitsas. “Anyone who defends him is a piece of shit.
Breitbart is equally sickened by Moulitsas’s actions. “The fact that NBC entertains him and puts him on ‘Meet the Press’ when his tactics on a day-to-day basis are sub-human,” Breitbart told TheDC. “It speaks to what has happened in the mainstream media in these crazy times.”
What’s Moulitsas’s defense for allowing the publication of the underage girls’ personally identifiable information in an attempt to exonerate the scandal-plagued Weiner? “Daily Kos is a community site with tens of thousands of diarists,” he told TheDC. “We do not exert editorial control over community content.”
Moulitsas said Daily Kos will only remove information in certain obscure circumstances and that it’s a “community site” where the bloggers decide what they want to write about. “We’ll remove copyright violations when we get a DMCA takedown notice,” Moulitsas said in an email. “We’ll remove any direct calls to violence (I can count the instances in one hand). That’s it. If anything else has been removed, it has been removed by the diarists themselves.”
Moulitsas threw in one last dig at conservative bloggers. He said if people didn’t probe the #Weinergate story, underage girls’ identities wouldn’t have gotten published in connection to the scandal. “Of course, none of this would’ve happened had conservatives not employed an ‘anything goes’ effort to destroy Rep. Anthony Weiner,” he said.
Breitbart said liberals will do anything they can to protect Weiner instead of trying to find out what really happened in this scandal. “There is a standing policy on the organized left when it comes to Breitbart stories. That tactic is to just shoot and not aim,” he said “This tactic worked in creating a provably false meme of selectively editing for ACORN, Sherrod and the University of Missouri labor studies course.”
Breitbart points to Salon.com editor Joan Walsh’s appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC this week. When Matthews asked her why Weiner doesn’t just say he did not appear in the photo and he had nothing to do with it, Walsh revved up the spin machine. “You know, I don’t know Chris,” she started. “I’m a good Irish-Catholic girl. I’m not going to sit here and talk about what pictures he may or may not have of himself on his computer. It’s none of my business. But, he said that he didn’t send the pictures out and, you know, my position from the beginning is I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt because this originated with Andrew Breitbart.”
Breitbart told TheDC that “Chris Matthews, perhaps mindful that he was witnessing this happen once again, stopped Salon’s editorial liar-in-chief Joan Walsh in her tracks of the big Sherrod lie.”
“There is no love lost between me and Matthews, but he showed immense integrity to point out the obvious that Walsh was digging in once again to try to bury a political enemy with a barrage of malicious lies,” he said.
On her Salon.com blog, Walsh /www.salon.com/news/anthony_weiner_dny/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2011/06/01/weiner_talk_gets_weird">http://www.salon.com/news...1/weiner_talk_gets_weird" style="color: rgb(0, 88, 166); text-decoration: none; ">attacked Matthews’s line of questioning. “Chris Matthews came at me hard today with a question I didn’t expect: Why can’t Rep. Anthony Weiner say ‘with certitude’ that the racy crotch-shot seen ’round the world isn’t his?,” Walsh wrote. “Matthews pretty much challenged NY 1’s Errol Louis to reassure him that no such photos exist on Louis’s own computer; he didn’t pose that question to me. I can safely say I have no suggestive photos of myself on my computer.”
The Kos blogger has since removed the young girls’ personally identifiable information, but, according to Christopher, without any intervention from Moulitsas.
