Jason Zengerle of The New Republic is really starting to piss me off. He is on the warpath to embarass anyone associated with Jerome Armstrong, including Markos and Chris Bowers. First Roddy Boyd of the Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post revealed that Armstrong had made some kind of deal with the SEC over allegations that he had acted “as a shill for a worthless dot-com stock.” None of us in the blogosphere had any way to assess the truth of his allegations, nor could we know why Jerome allegedly took a deal rather than fight the charges. All we knew was that Jerome was quoted in the article:

Armstrong denied to The Post that he did anything wrong and said the SEC made a mistake in charging him. “This was a long time ago and I settled the case without admitting or denying guilt, and I paid no fine,” said Armstrong, who refused to comment further.

Armstrong signed off on a settlement of the charges on Dec. 16, 2003, barring him from touting securities. In addition, Armstrong agreed never to deny any of the SEC charges. It was not immediately known if his statement to The Post denying guilt would violate the settlement agreement.

Provided that Jerome was quoted accurately and that Boyd had his facts right, it was immediately apparent that Jerome was contrained by the deal from defending himself. While it was obvious that the charges were unseemly, it was also obvious that Jerome was being attacked by a Murdoch outlet and he couldn’t say much in his defense. It was also obvious that the reason for raising these allegations now was to use them to attack Markos after his wildly successful convention in Las Vegas and his appearance on Meet the Press.

None of the major liberal bloggers wanted to assist Murdoch in this attack…especially considering the circumstances. But that basic respect for Jerome’s awkward position and that basic awareness of what was going on apparently meant nothing to Jason Zengerle. He came across a private email that Markos sent out that addressed the issue and he published the contents.

Now he has published more private emails. The essential charge against Markos is that he made a request (in his private email) that appeared to have been respected.

My request to you guys is that you ignore this for now. It would make my life easier if we can confine the story.

Zengerle is now suggesting a conspiracy to explain why this request was respected.

As I wrote in this post,
some of that influence likely stems from the ideological and partisan
loyalty liberal bloggers feel toward him. But I also raised the
question of whether Kos exercised some degree of financial influence
over liberal bloggers through something called the Advertising
Liberally BlogAds network. A number of Kos’s defenders have criticized
me for misunderstanding the nature of Advertising Liberally and Kos’s
relationship with it.

Let me join in chorus of people criticizing Zengerle for misunderstanding the blogads network. Chris Bowers administrates it, but that means next to nothing. The idea that Chris Bowers would direct advertising my way or refrain from doing so for political reasons is absolutely preposterous. And, it is even less likely that Markos would ask him to do so, and even more preposterous that Bowers would heed such a request. All this is is an effort to slime the entire progressive netroots by associating us with a several year-old problem Armstrong had with the SEC, which we knew nothing about and that we are contrained from fully understanding.

I am not, and never was, on the Townhall mailing list and I never received any request from Markos to starve the Armstrong story of oxygen. I just had the basic decency and good sense to do so on my own. And, I’d actually continue to starve it of oxygen if it were not for Zengerle’s insinuations about the character of Chris Bowers. I’ve banned one person on this site for making this same slur over a sustained period of time and not listening to reason.

As soon as I saw Warner called a “progressive superstar” at Yearly Kos, watched his infomercial, and received my Warner t-shirt, I knew there would be a shitstorm over it. It looked really bad and Warner is a good man, but no progressive superstar. I knew that people would question whether there was some quid pro quo between Armstrong and Markos over Warner. But Zengerle’s tactics are absolutely despicable. Publishing private emails is a tactic of a scoundrel. Impugning the character of anyone that refuses to help Murdoch embarrass Markos, or suggesting that Chris Bowers might punish bloggers for editorial content (without a whiff of evidence) is disgusting.

I don’t support anyone that engages in pump and dump tactics. And if that is what Armstrong did, he deserves to be criticized for it. But we don’t know the facts, and it is just plain wrong to tar anyone that is associated with him for things they did not and do not know about. The New Republic is full of shit and they should be ashamed of themselves.