David Brooks calls the opposition to Joe Lieberman liberal inquisition. Interesting that he selects a religious analogy for his angry column today. It's the people in his party that are much closer to inquisition these days. Consider the recent "outing" by a wingnut blog of a New York Times lowly photographer as punishment for the Times having dared to do a fluff piece on the vacation homes of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Consider the demands that Bill Keller, the editor of the same paper, be gassed as punishment for publishing already known details about a government program that monitors international money transfers to stop acts of terror. Consider what Ann Coulter routinely says about the liberals and progressives. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or Sean Hannity.
None of this is as exciting fodder as the blogfascists, yours truly included, I assume. Brooks summarizes the campaign to unseat Lieberman like this:
What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.
Next has come the effort to expel Lieberman from modern liberalism. In a dark parody of the old struggle between Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, the highly educated, highly affluent, highly Caucasian wing of the Democratic Party has turned liberalism from a philosophy into a secular religion, and then sought to purge a battle-scarred warhorse on the grounds of insufficient moral purity.
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The big story out of the campaign last week was the aggressiveness Lieberman has finally brought to his side of the fight. Over the past few years, polarizers have dominated Congress because people who actually represent most Americans have been too timid or intellectually vacuous to stand up. Even today many Democrats who privately despise the netroots lie low, hoping the anger won't be directed at them.
But Lieberman has had no choice but to fight, and he will probably prevail. If he doesn't, and if his opponents go from statewide victory in Connecticut to a national primary assault in 2008, then I hope the Republicans will be smart enough to scoop up what is sure to come — yet another wave of disaffected Democrats looking for a political home.
It's nice of Brooks to give impartial advice to the members of the party he wants to see destroyed, and I, for one, will accept it at face value. Of course David just wants a healthy Democrat(ic)* party and real democracy. This requires that Lieberman run in the Democratic primary and then, if he fails to get elected, he will run in the elections, anyway. As an Independent. The next step for him would be to declare that he will remain a Senator even if a Republican happened to get more votes. - All this because what the deranged haters on the lefty blogs want does not matter at all. They are not voters; they are horrible fanged monsters who bite poor David in the butt and who destroy everything he values.
Do you think that David Brooks might hate blogs with the same acuteness he ascribes the bloggers? I don't know. But it may not be that much fun these days to Google your famous columnist name only to find lots of vituperations and criticisms of your wonderful writings, all of them on blogs.
There is no liberal inquisition. If the Lieberman debacle reminds me of anything at all it is the Spanish Inquisition in Monty Python. We blogfascists are about as organized as the holy inquisitors of those skits. We hate Lieberman because we hate George Bush. No, I meant: We hate Lieberman because we hate Bush and because Lieberman supports the Iraq occupation. I'll come again: We hate Lieberman because we hate Bush and because Lieberman supports the Iraq occupation and because he thinks that rape victims in hospitals which refuse emergency contraception can just hop in a cab and take a short ride to another hospital for the pill (while wiping off the blood from the cab seats and trying not to shake so) No,....
Actually, that's how the wingnuts would frame it. But I really want to keep the Monty Python skit in. Brooks is welcome to borrow it for his next piece on the horrible bloggers whom everybody hates.
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*Wingnuts shorten the party's name to the first version. That's one way of finding out if someone pretending to be a Democrat really is a troll.