Kos, Just A Little Bit Dirty

There is some discussion in the comments to this post about Kos complaining about being misquoted by The Hill. Posters are not very sympathetic considering how Kos has failed to correct any of his misquotations of John Kerry.

Today Kos is posting about the criticism which pops up from time to time in the media about him having been on the Dean payroll during the primary campaign.

I'm afraid he asked for it.

In his defense, as I've pointed out before in discussions of this, Kos did post a notice on his site of receiving payment from the Dean campaign. It wasn't until later that reports came out about the Dean campaign's use of such payments to improve Dean's reputation in the blogosphere, raising these ethics questions. There is a clear conflict of interest, and a lack of objectivity would not be unexpected.

It is also true that Kos's actions are no where as bad as those of the Bush administration in placing fake news stories without disclosure of their financial involvement.

However, it is also the case that Kos was paid by the Dean campaign, and has been waging a campaign of misquoting and distorting the statements and positions of John Kerry since the pirmary campaign.

Kos's defense comes down to the fact that he is not as dirty as some of his critics charge.

True, but only being a little bit dirty is a poor defense.