Ouch! Lanny Davis smacks down the hard left

It’s a clash of the hard left and the more ‘moderate’ wing of the Democratic party, as Clintonista Lanny Davis sticks it to Lamont’s hardline supporters (try to ignore his blatherings about the right wing):

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

â€¢ “Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]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).

â€¢ “Joe’s on the Senate floor now and he’s growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate” (by “ctkeith,” posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).

â€¢ 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 [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on” (by “tomjones,” posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

â€¢ “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).

â€¢ “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.

One Sunday morning on C-Span I debated Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel on the Lieberman versus Lamont race. Afterwards I received a series of emails–many of them in ALL CAPS (which often suggests the hyper-frenetic state of these extremist haters)–that were of the same stripe as the blog posts, and filled with the same level of personal hate.

But the issue is not just emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers. A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event–where he asked the candidate some critical questions–some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety.

Scary, eh?

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.

That’s not telling the whole story, though. It’s not that he just hasn’t denounced them. He denied having an association with them. Which was a outright lie.

Davis’ omission of that little factoid aside, it’s nice to see a prominent member of the Democratic party acknowledge in so many words what an increasingly wide number of party faithful have become: enraged, foaming-at-the-mouth, anti-war, military-despising, hate-Bush moonbats. Davis was just too nice and PC, apparently, to actually use those words. I, only the other hand, don’t feel bound by any such PC restrictions

More: In related Lieberman news, the Associated Press has declared today, and rightly so in my view, that the Lieberman race today will be the one to watch, along with the McKinney/Johnson runoff in Georgia. The direction of the Democratic party is, IMO, on the line today.

Oh, did you catch this piece from the WaPo this morning? They’re trying to spin frustration with Lieberman as dating back to issues dating back further than his support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. While I’m sure there was a degree of frustration, Democrats felt their disagreements with Joe Lieberman ‘tolerable’ – the Iraq war has changed all that, obviously. It’s a sin to stick by your decision on supporting “Bush’s war” and Joe may very well pay the price for that today.

Update: ST reader Karl at Leaning Straight Up appropriately titles his post on the topic: Liberal Epiphany: Bigotry and hate aren’t just for right-wingers anymore

Others blogging on this: Michelle Malkin, Don Surber, Joe Gandelman, Ankle Biting Pundits, Powerline, Blue Crab Boulevard, Liberty and Justice

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Regarding today’s primaries/runoffs: Mary Katharine Ham has a comprehensive list of what primaries to watch, and how to stay updated on them via the web.

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PM Update: Joe Lieberman’s campaign site has been hacked. Click here to find out the details.

I’m swamped right now, but will be back later to discuss the primary results as they come in and update with any new info related to the hacking incident.

Prior:

11 Responses to "Ouch! Lanny Davis smacks down the hard left"

Baklava says:

August 8, 2006 at 12:04 pm

Liberalism is a mental disease. Evidence mounts daily.

If I’m being too harsh. Lay the blame for this kind of judgment at the foot of the extremists who make moderate honest lefties seem extinct.
Leaning Straight Up says:

August 8, 2006 at 12:53 pm

Liberal Epiphany: Bigotry and hate aren’t just for right-wingers anymore

This is an interesting read, and follows something I commonly call pot meets kettle. A liberal suddenly realizes that all the accusations he has made against conservatives are just as prevalent in his own party.
The fact is that intolerance and s…
Severian says:

August 8, 2006 at 1:07 pm

If he’s just now discovering the hatred and bile that flows freely from the left, he must have been asleep or had his head in the sand for years now. That’s a common lie/meme/conceit of the left. They turn their noses up and say the conservatives are the ones who hate and such, when the opposite is true. Liberalism requires one to have an unmatched ability for self deceit/self deception. Only by ignoring the truth and convincing oneself that up is down, willfully blinding oneself, can a person of good conscience really embrace liberalism. Unfortunately, it’s apparent that the human ability for self deception is almost unlimited.
Lorica says:

August 8, 2006 at 1:18 pm

Who can get past the 2nd sentence. You are wrong more than right Lanny, the far left is a ridiculous group of individuals who are full of hate, and spitefulness, that will only do the rest of the Dem party harm. Your comparison is illogical and pathetically pleading for some sense from people, who as my esteemed colleague Baklava says so correctly, suffer from a mental disease. Which side suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome?? The far left hates when they are wrong, and hates the bearer of the bad tidings. Look at Prof. Deb Frisch, or this poor woman with the photograph of flight 93, Val McClatchy. How close is the extreme left who slash tires to doing bodily harm to a voter??? Even the article says someone was worried for his health. You have encouraged every kind of crazy idea to come forth from your base, and now you have gone full circle. You are what you hate most. You are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. You are slanderers, insolent, arrogant and boastful. You invent ways of doing evil, and consider it all good, as long as it is a Republican, or someone who you disagree with. It is time for the Dem party and their extreme leftists allies to take a step back and judge itself. Maybe just maybe they can pull themselves from this brink they are about to plunge over. – Lorica
Mwalimu Daudi says:

August 8, 2006 at 1:55 pm

Another Clintonista triangulates – “It’s not our fault, it’s the fault of the Far Right and the Far Left.”

But why should we buy it? It was William Jefferson Clinton and his trolls like Lanny Davis who fanned as much partisan hate as they possibly could during Clinton’s reign. As George Will pointed out once, while WJC was probably not the worst President the country ever had (for that honor it will be hard to displace the peanut farmer from Plains), he was certainly the worst person ever to be President. Now it has come back to bite the Democratic party.

Steve (are you reading this?) – you were right! When Lamont got his feeble 1/3 of the vote during the CT state convention earlier this year I wrongly dismissed him. I underestimated the Democrats’ love affair with rich dolts (see Kennedy, Kerry, Corzine, Rocky-feller, Edwards, etc.).
Mwalimu Daudi says:

August 8, 2006 at 2:58 pm

Lieberman campaign says Web site hacked

Thus begin the lawsuits, court challenges, investigations, re-counts, re-re-counts, chad counts, re-voting, more lawsuits, criminal charges,……..
CZ says:

August 8, 2006 at 3:08 pm

No matter who wins or loses this is gonna be fun to watch. I hope they tear each other to shreds tomorrow.

As Flounder once said,”Ooooh boy is this great!”
sanity says:

August 8, 2006 at 3:21 pm

Yet in showing such “surprise” that SUDDENLY noticing how the left is acting.

Surprise? No.

It is just gotten worse and worse, until it is ‘suddenly’ noticed as if this is a new phenomenon.

It isn’t.

Not only does this piece point out the left’s action and how it acts, but continues to smear the right.

Personally it was probably more on smearing the right.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing–in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against “communists and their fellow travelers.”

Need to reach back to McCarthy to associate all the right with?

How about someone a little closer to still living?

The joke line of the article:

I came to believe that we liberals couldn’t possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us.

I do not equate liberals and tolerant and kind.
Experience and knowledge has taught me different.
Ah, yes, the ACLU that tolerant bunch….

To suddenly think this is a strange occurrence when it has been rampant for quite some time now is quite disingenuous of him.

And in recent years–with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage–I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

And what about Olberman, farakkan, jesse jackson, al sharpton, al frankin, ect, ect.

Short memory or just selective-blindness/deafness?

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong.

It took all these years till the end of the Lieberman campaign to finally notice this?

Is he BLIND and DEAF?
Where has he been?

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.

Again, Blind as well as Deaf…

Why shouldn’t we attribute these haters to him?
The blackened face of Lieberman came from someone who has been closely situated with him, KOS head man has been in your commercials, ect.

Yes, he ought to denounce them…any wonder that he hasn’t yet? Wonder why?

Bigotry, ignorance and intolerance should not be tolerated and should be denounced no matter what side is doing it.
Severian says:

August 8, 2006 at 3:42 pm

Good points sanity. Excellent post.

And, for the record, while the left still just loves to rant about ol’Joe McCarthy, they are ignoring the fact that he was right. After the Soviet Union fell, and several decades of KGB files were opened, it was shown that Joe was correct and right on the money, the US was lousy with Communists and their fellow travelers, and the Soviet Union and KGB were sponsoring a lot of them and using all of them. It’s the same idiotic blindness and deliberate lies that they foist on us about Joe “tea drinking” Wilson. “He’s a whistleblower that Bush tried to get even with” they whine and shriek, when the FACTS are that Wilson is a partisan political hack that lied thru his teeth again and again in a deliberate, calculated attempt to damage this administration and the war effort. Everything he said is a lie, so he’s not a “whistleblower” he’s a lying political operative, just like the people McCarthy was after were indeed communists working against the interests of the US.

The left sure has poor choices in heroes.
Going to the Mat says:

August 8, 2006 at 3:58 pm

Liberal “Netroots” Scaremongering

The actions of the netroots left takes the politics of personal destruction to an extreme. No longer is vitrol and viciousness confined to the candidates or the opposing party’s policies, it is now being leveled as the supporters of a candidate
Drewsmom says:

August 8, 2006 at 8:38 pm

I’m just glad lanny davis had the balls to go on spittin chrissie matthews hardball and talk about this, I noticed chrissie’s face was getting beet red outside and he was gettin excited talkin to all the yankee lamont chicks. Chrissie really went mad with desire when the old hag from California, maxine, ugly ass, walters, came on and chrissie even asked her why she wasn’t back in Cal. trying to unseat diane feinstein, who also voted on the war, …. the ugly old hag made a good dodge on the questions.

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