Kos and Israel.

The Weekly Standard describes the political problem Israel's war presents for Daily Kos:

Combined, the half dozen front-pagers have written exactly one post on the subject. And that post, authored by Moulitsas, simply declared that he wouldn't write anything further on the subject. So while the most important story of the year develops, the nation's leading progressive blog has chosen to focus on the Indiana second district House race between Chris Chocola and Joe Donnelly. Nothing wrong with that; it's their prerogative to blog about whatever they like.

But inside the Kos diaries, it's been a different story. The conversation in the diaries has been overwhelmingly anti-Israel--and potentially disastrous for the Democratic party.

This is a very crisply outlined manifestation of a broader problem faced by Kos. The readership is gained with sharp opinions. It wants to transform that readership into political power. But the style and extremity of opinion doesn't suit the people who need to be won over. There's some ugly stuff over there, and perhaps a lot of it can be ignored, especially if it's just in the comments, like calling Israel "a spreading plague" that ought to be "dismantle[d]" -- which The Weekly Standard quotes.

IN THE COMMENTS: There's a lot of discussion about how much comments are seen or should be seen as what the blog is about. I write:

About quoting commenters, remember I had the experience yesterday of seeing my name printed in the New York Times right next to a quote that was written by one of my commenters (who wasn't named). Nothing I wrote was quoted, but there was my name. Fortunately, it wasn't a despicable quote, but it's a little scary to think how that would be read by most people, especially if they don't think about the relationship between the blogger and the commenters (which is that I'm providing a forum and policing only some undefined outer limit). And I initially misread it as quoting me, throughout the whole time I was writing a long post dissecting the article (not concentrating on that part of it). What does the casual reader think? Probably that it's what I said.