When you can't attack the message, attack the messenger.

Thanks, Steven.

UPDATE: "Looks like they’re backing away like Murtha from the war," says Jeff Jarvis (who, like Steven Taylor, links to these posts from David Corn and Glenn Reynolds).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dennis the Peasant tells his version of the history of the founding of OSM, in a post that could have been titled "The Revenge of Jethro Bodine." MORE: Dennis's previous post is on point too, and unlike the later one has a comments section.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Atrios has unleashed the commenters on Roger. I can almost empathize. It's actually a good opportunity to compare the behavior of lefty and righty commenters. The lefties, in this sample, are all over the place, in "open thread" mode, despite the assigned topic.

Elsewhere in the the left blogo-hemisphere, Kos inflicts a different kind of pain. Noting, as I have, that frequently nearly all of the headlines displayed at OSM are from Xinhua News Agency -- "the official propaganda mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party" -- Kos quips: "So, um, did OSM's $3.5 million in venture funds come from the Chinese government?" When the first commenter doesn't get the joke of his title ("OSM is Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece"), Kos explains that he's joking and adds, cogently:

[This is t]he kind of kink they should've worked out before their all-too-public launch.

That's why I'm a big fan of soft-launches. Quietly launch, work out the kinks with the help of early adopters, and then make your big splash announcement.

Yes. I really cannot fathom the thinking behind opening big with what little they had. Was it hubris? Sheer recklessness?

MORE: Funniest Kos comment: "They stole Cialis's logo." I knew that spit curl looked familiar. Spit curl. It's this. I'm not bodily-fluids blogging again. My bodily fluids post of the day was here. And what a nutty photo on Cialis's page [when I visited]. The man's hand is in the nose-thumbing position, and the couple seems to have a relationship that is the furthest thing from sexual. But I guess that's their pitch: "If a playful moment turns into the right moment, you can be ready." Nice marketing, really, encouraging guys to take the drug "just in case." Why would OSM invoke Cialis imagery? They've got a website up, "just in case," somewhere down along the line, they have something to write.

YET MORE: Dan at Riehl World View has some serious questions for Roger L. Simon:

From what I've read of Kelly [AKA Dennis the Peasant], he has attacked OSM, ... [b]ut it appears you are dodging legitimate ethics questions by suggesting it's only personal.... You asked this Dennis to share his ideas and after going quite a ways down the road with him and hitting on some new, perhaps even better ones, you simply dropped him? Is that true? Come on, Roger - you're better than this. At least I hope you are.

It's too shrewd by half for you to now say no contracts were signed. This isn't fiction writing you're into now, Roger. OSM is supposed to be about reporting credible information. If the CEO of OSM is going to kick the thing off by saying, hey, don't mind my hand shakes, they don't amount to anything, it's an ominous start.

In the end, no one cares about Kelly - if he is out, he's out. But you have started and are by design now the purported leader of a serious new venture. Might I suggest you start acting like one? Either get serious, or go back to playing around with a less than wealth enhancing blog like the rest of us.

AND EVEN MORE: Jeff Jarvis amused me with this:

Yet Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, promises this — with more haughtiness than I’d ever heard from Dan Rather — on its prevaricating post about the name:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere.

Oh, gag me with a mitre.

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

How could the prominent bloggers who put OSM together have retained so little sense of the spirit of blogging?

ON REREADING: To that last question, why did great bloggers lose the spirit of blogging? Perhaps, it was that they wanted to expand beyond blogging and had to leave blogging behind to pursue their ambitions. Oddly, lots of people trusted them to become business managers because they were good bloggers, but the enterprise involved sloughing off the blogger's attitude. Indeed, there was never any reason to think that because a person is good at blogging he'd be good at business.