IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, KOS: Kos is whining now about a campaign against him, “led by InstaPundit.”

I haven’t led a campaign, or called for people to de-link him, or anything. I find de-linking campaigns dumb, even when they’re not conducted by Jim Capozzolla. (But as Kevin Drum notes, when Democrats like John Kerry delink Kos, it’s because they have to — statements like his are vote killers.) I just noted Kos’s comments. And what bothered me about it wasn’t Kos. It was that Kos — who I used to think of as a reasonable if partisan lefty — seems to be infested with a degree of hatred that I previously associated with the Democratic Underground and other fringe sites.

As Michele Catalano notes, Kos said a nasty dumb thing, and everybody has noticed. That’s enough, where Kos is concerned. But it’s not about Kos. It’s about the rot that has infested so much of the left, of which Kos’s remarks were merely the latest manifestation. That said, Kos has been rather a weasel about first making the comments, then hiding them, then issuing a bogus pseudo-apology, and now — as if there were more to this than dumb statements on a blog that led to some angry commentary and email — he’s playing the victim and bragging about how he’s nobly standing up to a lynch mob.

But that behavior hardly makes him a stand-out on the left, either. I had just expected better from Kos.

UPDATE: Some lynching. “Heh,” indeed. Have we been trolled?

Roger Simon has more comments, but The Belgravia Dispatch has the last word.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kos now appears to have taken down his site. That seems excessive to me. All he really needed to do was to issue a genuine, non-weasely apology.

But then, he’s trying to make it as a political consultant, and as Kevin Drum notes, comments like the one on “mercenaries” undercut his value there. However, I’d like to see him back and blogging, in a somewhat more reasonable mode. (It was just a few days ago that I was recommending him as a reasonable lefty to Hugh Hewitt, though it seems like longer now.)

MORE: Kos is back now — just a server switchover, apparently. That’s good.

It looks as if Kerry’s decision to delink Kos has generated some unhappiness from some of the farther-out Dems.

Meanwhile Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft has some observations.