Is this dishonest or does Kos just not know?

This went up at about 12:45 EDT today:

Update: Can you believe that Lieberman's site is still down? I wonder if they're still trying to blame "bloggers" for their inability to pay their bills.

What's more, check out the URL that joe2006.com resolves to:

server1.myhostcamp.com/suspended.page/

"Suspended". Accounts are generally suspended for one of two reasons: 1) inappropriate or illegal content (which we can obviously rule out in this case), or 2) from lack of payment. And that would make sense given that the first screen when Lieberman's site went down was, indeed, a request that the website owner contact their billing department:

But at least an hour and a half earlier, TPMMuckraker posted this email from Lieberman's Web hosting company:

Hi Marion,

This note is to confirm that the suspension of displaying the website www.joe2006.com: was not due to to an overdue account. Friends of Joe Lieberman is completely paid in full. The screen that showed yesterday is a default image from the server. In order to isolate where the denial of service attack was coming into the site, we disabled it as rapidly as possible. Once we were able to isolate all the site files for study we were able to add an appropriate one-page maintenance message.

Your campaign has in fact paid every invoice submitted to it within a week and a half.

Several people in the Kos comments have already pointed this out, but the main page post has not yet been changed. Seriously, this is not the kind of thing left-bloggers can put up with: if someone did hack Lieberman's site, it looks terrible for Lamont and will give Lieberman an excuse to run as an independent. It could be a head-fake dirty trick (as when Karl Rove bugged his own office the eve of an election), but I'd say it's really unlikely. In any case, continually repeating it's because Lieberman failed to pay his bills is stupid.

UPDATE: As I was writing this, Kos updated his post to acknowledge the TPMMuckraker reporting, but declares the Lieberexplanation

doesn't pass the smell test -- DoS attacks wouldn't bring down a site for 18 hours (or however long their site has been down). So it could be their hosting provider is either covering for the Lieberman campaign, or perhaps more likely, it is simply incompetent.

Well that doesn't pass my smell test. It's pure CYA.

UPDATE AGAIN: I'm full of shit. People offering actual evidence weigh in. As does the Lieberman Web hosting guy. This is now boring and lame and I'm going to stop paying attention to it.

UPDATE THE THIRD: Okay, one last bit because it's funny as hell and I can't help it.

Caption: After the Lieberman campaign Web site crashed today, Mike Wence tried to fix the problem at Lieberman headquarters in Rocky Hill, Conn.

Mike Wence appears to be really pissed some grownup dragged him down to boring old Lieberheadquarters just to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete a million times. God! It's like nobody over 15 has ever seen a computer before!