Armando From The Daily Kos Was Outed? Not So Fast

Left-wingers love to make up wild accusations about conservatives so that they can then turn around and use those baseless charges to try to justify their own outrageous behavior. Just to give you one infamous example, Michelle Malkin, among many other bloggers, posted some phone numbers on her blog that an anti-military college group had put on a press release and on the front of their website. Next thing you know, you had liberals claiming Michelle had put up private phone numbers and in retaliation, they were posting her phone number, address, and map to her house online, presumably because they were hoping some nutjob would harass or assault her family.

That’s why a post by Armando over at the Daily Kos caught my eye — because it’s the same sort of thing some left-wingers have used before as a lame excuse for unexcusable behavior:

” A major Right wing site has chosen to support a troll’s campaign started at this site to out me.

The writing is on the wall. I will likely be giving up blogging as a result.

If people were wondering about why I was so adamant about this, I hope this explains it.

I have never written about my clients and whenever I had a conflict, I disclosed it. But people of ill will have no decency or limits.”

The “major Right wing site” Armando mentions is apparently a reference to National Review’s Media Blog.

Steven Spruiell from Media Blog mentioned that Armando’s real name was Armando Lloréns-Sar after getting a tip off from a reader that Armando had allegedly: “wrote a number of pro-corporate articles, of course without disclosing that he is a corporate attorney promoting these same issues for his clients.”

Now, at first glance, this might appear to lead to an ethical quandary: on the one hand, you don’t want to reveal a blogger’s anonymous identity, but on the other hand, if Spruiell believed Armando was pulling an Armstrong Williams and writing favorable articles about someone he represented without revealing it, then that’s information that people need to know.

However, here’s the rub: as Spruiell pointed out in a later post, Armando’s identity wasn’t a secret.

“(Armando’s) announcement was so unexpected to me because everything I wrote was based on information that Armando himself had shared with other web sites — his full name, his work affiliation, and his role as a blogger at Daily Kos are all listed together on these sites. He also posted his picture on his bio at another high-profile liberal blog. Yet for some reason, many are claiming that until I published this information, Armando’s identity was a well-kept secret. That is simply false.

…UPDATE: I didn’t link to the other web sites on which Armando shared identifying information because I’m trying not to inflame this situation any further. However, I linked to one of them my original post, and the others are easy to find. As I said, this was all a matter of public record long before I wrote anything.”

Spruiell chose not to mention the other blogs that mentioned Armando’s real name, but that’s information that needs to be out there since Armando is now publicly claiming he has been outed. So, here are a few of the websites that appear to have had Armando’s real name listed somewhere prior to Spruiell’s article (Note: this info was acquired by doing nothing more than a Google Search):

Clark Community Network, Confirm Them, Democracy for Oregon, Have Coffee Will Write, Majority Report Radio, NPR, Truthout, & Wikipedia.

Furthermore, if you simply do a Google Search for Armando and “Daily Kos,” the 4th entry currently shows this from Wikipedia:

“Armando Lloréns-Sar whose screen name is “Armando” at Daily Kos, filled-in for site founder Zuniga as the front page diarist during his book writing hiatus …”

It’s also worth noting that some of these entries, like the one from NPR for example, have been around since the Harriet Miers nomination.

NPR: ‘Bloggers’ Weigh In on Miers’ Withdrawal
Armando Llorens is an attorney who blogs for Daily Kos. … Would you like to receive information from your local NPR member station? …

So, whatever Armando’s real reasons are for quitting (could it be that Spruiell’s speculation about an ethics conflict was correct?), his decision doesn’t appear to be based on any sort of right wing campaign to out him because his real name appears to have been easy to access on the net for quite a while. Let’s hope this post sets the record straight, once and for all.

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!