Like West Virginia Senator Robert Bird, who once was a member of the Klu Klux Klan, but later came within the fold of current mainstream politics, Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) once opposed ALL participation by gays in the US Military and ridiculed President Clinton for attempting to write an executive order that would allow gays to serve with equality.  In the end, Clinton lost that battle and America got "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Back in 1993, MAMZ said in a letter entitled "Military Right that he published at his college newspaper,

It’s truly disturbing how much ado has been made over Bill Clinton’s campaign promise to lift the ban on homosexuals from the U.S. military. It’s ironic how it has taken a president who has never served in the military to make a promise that affects the military in such a negative manner. Those who have served in the military, such as myself, understand the demands and pressures of military life are incompatible with allowing integration with homosexuals.( . . . )MARKOS C.A. MOULITSAS Undecided Freshman

The insurmountable problem with “The Rehabilitation of Markos Moulitsas” is that Moulitsas acknowledges that he spent from 2001 until 2003 training with the CIA to be a member of their “Clandestine Services.”  (See Transcript of MAMZ’s Interview at the Commonwealth Club, June 2, 2006.)  So when MAMZ speaks, we are compelled to wonder and doubt whether we are hearing his true beliefs or are hearing CIA-funneled and sculpted efforts by MAMZ to endear himself to progressives in order that progressives be known and led primarily by a servant of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Personally, I believe that when admittedly extreme right-wing Republicans are trained at the CIA and then claim to have become progressives, and endeavor to claim the mantle of leader of all progressives, there must be an extremely high bar before credulity can be given to anything and everything at all that they say. I believe that bar can never, ever be vaulted under circumstances such as those of MAMZ.

The incredible nature of MAMZ's statements in the past cast a long shadow over everything he says in the present.  For example, in spite of having the maternal surname "Zúñiga" and being born to a mother who was from El Salvador, MAMZ essentially said, in an article published at his college newspaper, that he is not Hispanic or Latino, but is simply a white man who would never be subject to discrimination.  On that occasion, MAMZ said,

Today the [Northern] Star ran the last of my four-part series on racism at NIU. Having been a project that dominated my life for the last couple of weeks, I was more than glad to have it finished and over with so I could return to the mundane world of Faculty Senate meetings and other reporter stuff. Yet as I gathered the last interviews and typed the final words of the final story, I was overcome by a strange, uneasy feeling. I was terribly happy to escape the ugliness of a racist world for the safety of my every day-to-day life. Sure, I could always talk against racism, fight ignorance and prejudice wherever I ran into it, yet I would always be looking in from another room and I could always close the door. My life, in my world, in my own detached selfishness. And as I left the ugly reality of racism behind, it struck me that what was such an easy and trivial exercise for me would be impossible for anyone whose skin color or religious persuassion made them the target of bigotry and discrimination. They would never be able to escape who they were.

Who are the "THEM's" an the "THEY's" referred to in the passage above?  If you read Moulitsas’ assigned series of articles (see links to all Moulitsas college articles) about "racism" on his college campus, it's clear that the people he says he can divorce himself from are the Blacks and Latinos on his own college campus.  He is not one of them, but is merely reporting on their difficulties because the college newspaper editor has asked him to do so.  He expresses great relief when the task is over and he can go back to thinking and acting like a privileged heterosexual white man, rather than confront the difficulties of a Latino in Northern Illinois.

Many Blacks have "passed for white" over the centuries, in order to have more opportunities and avoid color-aroused barriers to their success, as well as color-aroused antagonism and violence.  MAMZ makes it clear above that he has chosen to "pass for white" rather than acknowledge his Latino heritage, and he underscores this choice by insisting that he be called "Markos Moulitsas," rather than "Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga". 

Why should he "own" his mother's heritage when it will prevent him from "leav[ing] the ugly reality of racism behind" and compel him to face "skin color or religious persuassion (sic) [that] made them the target of bigotry and discrimination?  It is far easier for him to simply identify as a clueless white man and use the light color of his skin to insist that he isn't Latino.  Who can blame him from wanting to run from Latino ethnicity. What makes this facile approach questionable is his subsequent insistence that he was a Hispanic/Latino leader while he was a student at Northern Illinois University. The above letter written by MAMZ makes his later claim simply impossible to believe. What Hispanics would choose to be led by a man who practiced “detached selfishness” where Latino issues were concerned?

There still remains a problem to such a flight from reality: MAMZ's Greek father has died and all of MAMZ’s known relatives are from Salvadoran heritage.  MAMZ even celebrated his honeymoon at his “family business” hotel conglomerate in San Salvador. The Jaltepeque Suites Hotel that MAMZ called his “family business” is a part of a much larger real estate and tourism conglomerate called Club Joya Del Pacífico.

MAMZ is the “convenient Latino.” When noting his mother’s ownership of a hotel in El Salvador that charges 140 dollars per night (one tenth the yearly family income of Salvadorans), MAMZ is the son of his wealthy Latino mother. Meanwhile, here in the United States, MAMZ maintains “detached selfishness” from Latinos, which explains why only one percent of the visitors to the “Daily Whitosphere” blog are Latino, according to Quantcast.com. “Detached selfishness” on MAMZ’s part has led Latinos to ignore MAMZ and to be very suspicious of his patently false claims, denied and reasserted according to the circumstances, that MAMZ is a poor immigrant (born in Chigaco). For example, Jose Antonio Vargas wrote at the Washington Post that Yearly Kos was “a sea of middle-aged white males.”

Meanwhile, the “Unapologetic Mexican” blog says,

Bottom line: When you collaborate with Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga, there is an altogether outsized chance that you are unknowingly supporting a CIA-sponsored front organization run by a member of the Salvadoran oligarchy, and you are collaborating indirectly with the “family business” and that is polluting an internationally recognized endangered estuary by clearing trees, keys, and building condominiums that pollute a fragile ecosystem.

Some readers will exclaim, “But Markos Moulitsas has done so much good for progressives!” I believe that’s precisely the impression the CIA planned to promote when Markos Moulitsas admittedly trained with the CIA during 2001 until 2003. MAMZ has acknowledged training at the CIA but has never disavowed working for them at the present time. I personally wonder, without people like MAMZ, how could the CIA reliably control the flow and nature of information, the initiatives and participants of the American Left?

I also wonder how much money MAMZ stands to inherit when businesses like Jaltepeque Suites Hotel, Club Joya del Pacífico and Baja Salt Group are bequeathed to the younger generation of the family that owns these family businesses?

Can you really be a “progressive” in the United States when your Salvadoran family owns international conglomerates, one of which received a one million dollar loan guarantee from the United States Government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)? MAMZ is dedicated, but the question is, “to whom”?