Las Vegas—The YearlyKos convention ended here Sunday in a blaze of publicity. The nation’s top political reporters came to the Riviera Hotel to get a first-hand look at supporters of DailyKos, the nation’s most popular liberal website, and they didn’t leave before writing thousands of words about it all.

But much of that coverage, especially in the largest papers with the broadest readerships, involved simple explanations of what DailyKos is, who is involved with it, and why Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Senator Barbara Boxer, and presidential candidate Mark Warner traveled to Las Vegas to speak to them. “This community first demonstrated its power by supporting Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign,” the Washington Post reported in a typical passage, “helping him raise tens of millions of dollars and propelling him into front-runner status for the Democratic nomination until his candidacy imploded.”

There will undoubtedly be more of that sort of thing in the days to come; after all, many readers know little or nothing about DailyKos. But at some point, coverage of the DailyKos phenomenon will move into a new cycle. In politics, no person, and no movement, can attract as much attention as DailyKos has received recently without eventually attracting scrutiny. And that will likely bring attention to what is said—and who says it—on the website.

The obvious focus will be on DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas himself. While his writings—and the controversies they have caused—are an old topic in the blogosphere, they have remained largely unexamined in major media outlets. For example, one of Moulitsas’s most famous statements, involving the brutal murders of four American contractors in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004—“I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”—has been the target of extensive criticism on conservative blogs and in conservative media outlets, but, according to a search of the Nexis database, has never been mentioned in the Washington Post. (It was quoted, once, in the New York Times, deep in a September 2004 feature story on bloggers.) Nor has it been reported in any major newsmagazine or been the topic of conversation on any major television program.

The same is true for other things Moulitsas has written. For example, in January of this year, Moulitsas reflected on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror:

These blowhards pretend they are macho even as they piddle on themselves in abject terror from every “boo!” that comes out of Osama Bin Laden’s mouth.

Also in January, Moulitsas found extensive common ground between Republicans and Osama bin Laden:

Okay, who said:

“Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he ‘made a mistake’, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?”

And who said:

“We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication [and] homosexuality...”

That’s Osama Bin Laden. And wow, he sounds just like Republicans!…

Let’s not forget that ultimately, Osama’s vision for the Arab world is far more akin to the Right’s vision of America… On homosexuality, on militarism, on women’s rights, on religion in school, on capital punishment, on free speech, on curtailment of civil liberties, and on a million different other issues Islamic fundamentalists don’t share many disagreements with the ideologues running our country.

The reason we hate Islamic fundamentalists is pretty much the same reason we’re fighting to take back this country from the Republicans. They are two peas from the same pod, and diametrically opposed to everything we liberals stand for.

And that’s just this year. Critics looking for more material will likely find plenty in Moulitsas’s writings since he began blogging in 2002.

One theme of coverage of the YearlyKos convention is that Moulitsas and his followers are playing an active role in the 2006 and 2008 campaigns. Left unsaid is whether they will be an asset or a liability for the candidates they support. It seems reasonable to expect that any Democratic candidate who allies himself with Moulitsas, or accepts DailyKos support, will be asked, by Republican opponents, whether he or she endorses some of the things Moulitsas has written and said.

Indeed, Moulitsas himself has set an example for withdrawing support from—and threatening—those who have anything to do with statements that Moulitsas finds objectionable. For example, in January, he reacted angrily to a comment from Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf, who, in an interview with the Washington Post, discussed the role of netroots activists in future campaigns. “The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left,” Elmendorf told the paper. In response, Moulitsas wrote:

Mr. Elmendorf almost got it right. The trick, in reality, is to stop appearing like our Democrats are held captive to sleazebag amoral lobbyists. Here’s notice, any Democrat associated with Elmendorf will be outed. The netroots can then decide for itself whether it wants to provide some of that energy and money to that candidate.

In his remarks introducing Mark Warner in Las Vegas last week, Moulitsas praised Warner for being one of the first to recognize the power of the liberal netroots—for realizing, in Moulitsas’s words, that “maybe we weren’t these far-left extremist wackos that everybody else seems to think we are.” Indeed, many participants in the convention expressed frustration with the way in which bloggers are sometimes portrayed. Yet the remarkable thing is how little scrutiny Moulitsas’s writings have received in major media outlets. Now, after YearlyKos and all the attention that came with it, it seems likely that will change.

— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time.