I think we should keep this discussion clear of the Kerry website and stop demanding they take a stand and get themselves involved. The de-linking of Kos was a public statement, and some have interpreted it to mean that the Kerry site assumes responsibility for the content of sites on their blogroll.
They need to add a disclaimer for outside content. But in my opinon, there are some factors that probably led to the public statement which haven't been considered yet...
First, the firestorm over Kos's original comment had spilled over to forums on their site, even though they had nothing to do with any of it. I believe that's the first time a blogosphere controversy has landed over there (I'm not counting the crosstalk between various candidates' blogs during the primaries). So, all of a sudden they
did have people posting the comment on their own site and demanding a response, and totally ignoring a gathering controversy is a risky decision. It's better for them to cut the link and move on to matters relevant to the campaign, because otherwise the right has another angle of attack to exploit. Of course, the downside is that.. a number of Kos and Atrios readers are suddenly making demands on them.
But let's be realistic; Kos has not been terribly strong in his support for Kerry. Nor have a good deal of people in this side of the blogosphere, which was heavily pro-Dean, and to a lesser degree pro-Edwards and pro-Clark, and where a good number of the attacks on Kerry currently used by the GOP were perpetuated during the primaries. It's not that this site hasn't raised enough money to be important; it's not that the Kerry camp got scared by a bunch of angry emails from right-wingers. I'm sure they get floods of angry right-wing email on a daily basis. It's that.. shit, guys, a lot of you have been calling John Kerry names since Day 1, and now you expect his campaign staff to turn around and throw their official support behind Kos, or you'll keep calling him the same names you've been calling him all along?
Don't make me laugh. This place is only growing in influence and I'm super thrilled about it.. but you can't on one hand reserve the right to say absolutely anything inflammatory in the name of free speech, and on the other hand expect candidates for public office to risk getting off message and throwing their own campaigns off track to mire themselves in a controversy they did nothing to generate. You can expect even less public support from the campaign of a candidate who you've been publicly bashing up until the day his last serious opponent dropped out of the primary contest.
I hate to be this harsh but.. the way for this controversy to die down is for Kos to suck it up, issue a mea culpa, and move on, and for the rest of us to do the same. I got mad at the pile-on from the rightwing blogs and rated the original comment a "4," which I think was a serious mistake. I'm not going to change my rating, but I was wrong to have responded with a knee-jerk show of support for an indefensible remark.