Via Atrios, via Digby, who links to Tristram Shandy, after beginning thusly…

I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, "she got it out there, didn’t she?"

Here’s another little pointer on wingnut gossip mongering and dirty politics. As you sling the shit with the biggest megaphone you can find, be sure to primly assert that you don’t believe a word of it and chastize those who are doing it on the victim’s behalf. It makes you look like a good guy even though your purpose is to spread the gossip far and wide.

In this case it doesn’t matter much because the "gossip" is irrelevant to normal people and would make no difference if it were true. This gossip is aimed solely at the wingnut doughboy losers who couldn’t manage to get laid at the Bunny Ranch with 5k in their pockets. Still, it’s nice of one of the leading voices in the blogosphere to spread it around, (while being above it all, of course.) It’s good practice for serious swift-boating.

Digby is referring to a post Instapundit (who is not a moderate libertarian-republican, but only plays one for effect) made concerning Markos, of Daily KOS who, running one of the biggest of the liberal-progressive blogs, now finds himself the target of the republican propaganda machine.  One simply cannot challenge the establishment party line and expect to get away with it.  Reynolds happliy plays his role, goosing a rumor that Markos is…wait for it…gay.

And as an aside, I see some blog-commenters are speculating that Kos is gay. Why that should matter, I don’t know, but I remember — back when the blogosphere was younger and people were nicer — commiserating with Kos over his wife’s miscarriage (my wife and I had several) and assuring him that it didn’t preclude successful pregnancies later on, which I believe his wife has since had. So try to keep things at something better than a seventh-grade level. 

…to which Tristram responds…

If it doesn’t matter, Glenn, why mention it? From the looks of it, the genial professor did so only to further cement his rep as a "gentleman" — the "civility" thing, you know? Why he had to use rumors about Kos’ sexuality and a rehashing of a miscarriage to do so is beyond this page’s comprehension.

Because he’s a gutter crawling Bush republican thug is why.  What else about him did you need to know?   Why else would speculation about his sexual orientation matter?  Digby’s right…this is about pumping up the bigot base, and practice for some serious swift boating later on as election day draws near.