Liberal McCarthyism
By LANNY J. DAVIS
August 8, 2006; Page A10
Mr. Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton between 1996-98, is the author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America," forthcoming from Palgrave.
WASHINGTON -- My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.
(snip)
• "Ned Lamont and his supporters need to
et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby" (by "rim," posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).
• On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).
• "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).
• "Joe Lieberman is a racist and a religious bigot" (by "greenskeeper," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).
And these are some of the nicer examples.
(snip)
I do not blame Joe Lieberman's political difficulties on the liberal blogosphere. Most Connecticut Democrats voting for Mr. Lamont are genuinely outraged at President Bush for his Iraq War policies. They are entitled to express that outrage by voting for him and against Sen. Lieberman on that basis alone, although Sen. Lieberman's record as a progressive Democrat and his opposition to President Bush not only on most domestic issues but also on the conduct of the war cannot be disputed -- despite egregiously distortive ads paid for by Mr. Lamont with $4 million of his own money.
Moreover, the support he gets from these haters should not be attributed to Mr. Lamont -- nor should he be blamed for their extremism, bigotry and intolerance. But he ought to denounce them. He hasn't as yet. Mr. Lamont and all other liberal Democrats should remember the McCarthy era and not fall into the trap of the hypocrisy of the double standard -- that it's not OK when Ann Coulter dispenses her venomous hatred, but it is OK when our side's versions of Ann Coulter do.
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