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Clinton official: Lamont supporters seethe with hate, anti-Semitism
by Lanny Davis, Wall Street Journal

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
“... 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.”
spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.

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." . . . 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. 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.

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.
(Not that it ever did.)
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:

“... 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)”
• "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).

• "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).

• 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).

• "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).

. . . 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.

“He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety. . .”
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. . . .

Mr. Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton between 1996-98, is the author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics (i.e. the stuff we did to Ken Starr) Is Destroying America," forthcoming from Palgrave.

The rabid visciousness of the common North American moonbat (Liberalis ieffinghatebushis) is no news to anyone who's spent any amount of time here in Rantburg observing some of the pathetic creatures caught in the municipal Sink Trap, or peeked in at the DU/Kos/MyDD/TimesSelect fever swamps, but it is interesting that (1) now they're turning on brother liberals like Lanny Davis with a fury equal to what they use on us conservatives, (2) Davis (to his credit) is sufficiently bothered by this that he actually breaks the "no enemies on the Left" rule to speak up about it, and (3) Davis seems to be on the ragged edge of recognizing (and admitting out loud) that this is the logical end of the attack machine politics he and the other Clintonistas perfected in the 1990s.
Posted by: Mike 2006-08-08
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=162319