I haven’t really been following the flap about Kos. But Billmon’s lengthy wrap-up seemed smart. The closing ‘grafs are particulary worthwhile:

The Lieberman Dems don’t hate and fear Kos and the Daily Kos “community” because they are too far to the left. They hate them because they represent an emerging power center within the Democratic Party that they don’t control — what’s more, one that is now much closer to the public mainstream on the central issue of our time (the Iraq War) than they are. The overriding concern for the neolibs, I think, is not that Kos and the netroot activists will lead the party off to the far-left fringes, but rather that they are willing, even eager, to form alliances with conservative nationalists like Jim Webb (the Va. Senate candidate) who’ve been forced out of the GOP because of their opposition to the neocons and their insane schemes…. Add in the cheerful brutality with which Kos and Jerome have skewered the consultants and the DLC Dems, the primary defeat now looming over Joe Lieberman’s head, and the rice bowls that could be broken if the old system of campaign graft is abandoned, and it’s easy to understand why the long knives are out. Whether the grown ups (Peretz, Lieberman, Hillary) actually set the Swiftboat in motion, or just watched approvingly (“Who shall rid us of this meddlesome blogger?”) as their hatchet boys did what comes natural, is almost irrelevant. The important thing to understand is that we have reached the point where the Dinos and their media allies are willing to use Rovian tactics against anyone who challenges their entrenched position — even someone like Kos, who is hardly the second coming of Henry Wallace or George McGovern. Whether that’s good or bad for the Kossaks I don’t know — I suppose it depends on how much credence you give to Gandhi’s old saw: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” In the real world — and in imperial America, too — the truth is that sometimes they ignore you, then ridicule you, then fight you and crush you like an overripe eggplant. We’ll see if that’s true this time. Either way, though, it looks like the battle between the netroots and dino Dems is going to get very down and dirty indeed.

Fascinating.