One of my favorite liberal hawkish bloggers, Marc Danzinger, looks at the ever-increasing fury among liberal non-hawkish bloggers at Joe Lieberman, and wonders exactly what a Ned Lamont primary victory will mean:

First, and foremost, I’m a Democrat who supported and supports the war in Iraq. That’s a longer discussion than we’re going to have here, so let’s just note it and put it on the shelf. I get it that my position isn’t uncontroversial. But is there room in the party for me and the people like me?

The answer would very much appear to be “no,” particularly if a group of organized liberal bloggers nationwide can knock off Lieberman with a candidate who resembles a nervous, talking-point-addicted C-3PO in an ill-fitting suit.

 

What periodically baffles me is the fact that an increasingly influential, vocal-as-all-hell faction of the Democratic Party has looked at their current circumstances – minority in the House, minority in the Senate, shut out of the White House until Jan. 20, 2009, 31 red states, etc. – and decided that their biggest problem… the figure who is most deserving of their ire, whose defeat is the highest priority is…  Joe Lieberman.

 

Imagine if the conservative bloggers got together and decided to focus an inordinate amount of their energy and rhetoric upon defeating… Arnold Schwartzenegger. Or Chuck Hagel. Or Olympia Snowe, or Arlen Specter. Many conservatives don’t like their stands on this issue or that issue; Pat Toomey got plenty of grassroots support a few years back. But the rage-to-irritated-tolerance ratio is positively milquetoast compared to the lefty “netroots.”

 

Even if you take the least conservative Republican lawmaker on the national scene, Lincoln Chafee, the disdain rises to making the face that you make when you smell sour milk. Many on the right would really like to see Chafee defeated in this year's primary. But there’s no equivalent “Rape Gurney Joe” nickname, no Powerline guys popping up in his challenger’s Mentos-ad-esque commercials, no damning the incumbent for intolerable “rudeness” because he interrupted his opponent.

 

Elsewhere, I wondered just why the Ned Lamonts, Mark Warners, etc. of the world put such faith in the judgment of the netroots.  David Brooks suggests that many Democratic lawmakers secretly loathe their own grassroots.

 

Well, criminy, buddy, if you think your base voters have gone nuts, you had better try to do something about it! Your grassroots aren’t going to get sane on their own.

 

Threatening toddlers? DOS attacks? My “Reaver gas” comparison is looking less and less outlandish with each passing week. We know these folks won’t listen to me or anybody they perceive as just another chickenhawk neocon warmonger… they might listen to established Democratic lawmakers.

 

How much further can this trend continue? The behavior of "Clinton-hatred" petered out when the forty-second president left office; somehow I suspect this mentality will outlast the Bush presidency.

 

By the way, if Brooks' anecdote is true... how sad is that? How could I entrust a Democratic lawmaker to stand up to al-Qaeda, Iran, North Korea or some other angry extremist, if he or she won't stand up to Daily Kos?