Caught on Twitter: Daily Kos Founder Jokes About Pittsburgh Cop Shooting

On Saturday, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and one of his front page contributors, Dana Houle, joked about the Pittsburgh police killings while 3 cops' blood was still drying on the pavement.

Their exchange, via Twitter, was seen by thousands of people or more, including myself. Here are the relevant tweets: (you can check out Kos' Twitter feed, my Twitter feed, and Dana Houle's Twitter feed if you want to look for context)

DanaHoule With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 20 hours ago from TweetDeck

DanaHoule "He said he'll be ready if there's ever an invasion of the United States and that he had stockpiled foods and guns..." Wolverines!! about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck

markosmoulitsas RT @DanaHoule: With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

TommyXtopher What does this mean? RT @danahoule @markosmoulitsas With no Veep to shoot people, folks are taking things in to their own hands about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

markosmoulitsas When we were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk "revolution" and kill cops. about 15 hours ago from TweetDeck

For the uninitiated, RT means "re-tweet," a way of passing along something you liked or want to comment on. I asked Markos to clarify several times, and he sticks by it.

Since then, the story has been picked up by major blogs like Huffington Post, Redstate, and Hot Air.

Here's why this is such a big deal:
Markos Moulitsas is a genuine hero. The community he started at Daily Kos gave voices to millions of people who felt that they were being ignored under the Bush Administration's rule. He brought blogging out of it's infancy, turning average Americans into news editors more powerful than those at the TV networks. The media landscape has been changed forever, mostly for the better.

As a wise webslinger once said, though, with great power comes great responsibility. Although his influence has waned somewhat, Kos is still the go to guy, the name most closely associated with liberalism. In that way, he is a spokesman for true liberals, those who fight for what is right, not just what is achievable.

So when I saw him repeat Dana Houle's joke, a crass crack about Dick Cheney's hunting accident and the Pittsburgh slayings, I was stunned. I waited for the follow-up that never came, where he would tell Houle that he had crossed the line, that decency demanded an apology.

Since then, Markos and Houle have defended the joke, and Houle even says it wasn't a joke:

...it wasn't a "joke," and one would probably have to be looking for that meaning to conclude that it was. The reality is that the rightwing has been scaring the hell out of people about how Obama is going to take away their guns so much that it's practically inevitable that now that he's president we're going to see more instances of vulnerable people on the edge of paranoia taking these fearmongering claims to heart and go on shooting sprees.

He doesn't explain the part of his "non-joke" that asserts that Dick Cheney's tenure as Vice President was the only thing keeping mass shooters at bay. Maybe he meant it wasn't a joke because it wasn't funny.

This kind of tinfoil rhetoric harms the liberal cause, my cause. Markos denounces conservatives for their loose talk about taking away guns, and in the same breath says that conservatives prefer to kill cops. More broadly, I'm starting to feel like a lot of the liberal blogosphere is forgetting what it means to be a liberal, or maybe I'm using the wrong word. After 8 years of mortal kombat with the right, we've swung too far, become too belligerent.

We're supposed to be better than this, it's why we fight. But when we engage in this kind of scattershot haymaking, we give up the right to say a single word about it when Ann Coulter trashes 9/11 widows, or when Palin accuses our President of pallin' around with terrorists. We need to know where the line is. We're not stand-up comics, or radio entertainers. We have a responsibility to our ideals that we ought not to betray for a cheap, barely-audible laugh.

Tommy on: Daily Dose:

• * How Daily Kos Handles Criticism: Death Wishes and Cyber-Griefing
• * Twitter Badness: DailyKos Frontpager, Kos Joke About Pittsburgh Cop Shooting
• * Today's Quickies and...They're Swayze-rrific!

Tommy on: Twitter