On Monday night I talked about Criticism vs. Self-Righteousness, and I gave this fair warning:

It would help a few people, before they go on tirades about Williams's behavior, to recall any mistakes made in their life.  I'm sure all can think of a few.  The man has apologized, and it's not as if he has a history of such behavior.  It's time to break up the posse and move on.

Now, chalk it up to the fact that I didn't post this soon enough, or my blog viewership is so small that my messages don't spread wide enough.  But the message was something that people should have took heed of.

One of those people is Markos Zuniga, the owner of the Daily Kos.  On Friday, Kos commented on a passage by David Corn from The Nation.  Corn said:

"This happens all the time," he told me. "There are others." Really? I said. Other conservative commentators accept money from the Bush administration? I asked Williams for names. "I'm not going to defend myself that way," he said. The issue right now, he explained, was his own mistake. Well, I said, what if I call you up in a few weeks, after this blows over, and then ask you? No, he said.

And to this, Kos responds:

Until names are named, we can assume every conservative pundit is on the White House's payola rolls.

It's a shameful barb, and although he probably won't admit it, I bet it's one that Kos wishes he never made.  Yesterday the internet campaign leader of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, Zephyr Teachout of Zonkette, made a public omission of her own:

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

Now, Kos for the most part was being duped, and thought they really wanted him and Armstrong, who runs the MyDD blog, for technical support.  You can't fault him there.  He also put up a disclaimer, which said he was being paid to provide technical support to the campaign.

This isn't a question about ethics in the case of Kos, as he's pretty clear on that end.  However, now that we know there are leftists that are being paid by the politicans that they comment on, should we follow Kos's lead and assume that all of the left-wing commentators are being paid off as well?

So, what chu talkin bout, Willis?

Ha.  Maybe you guys will take caution in choosing your words when the next big story hits.

But hey, at least Kos will have his name in the news.  He'll be in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal.