Say It Ain't So, Joe

the liberal media
By Eric Alterman
The Nation

Though he ran as an "independent Democrat" and bragged of his deep connection to traditional Democratic interest groups, Lieberman has finally come out of his private closet as a right-wing Republican, not merely endorsing John McCain for President but embracing virtually every accusation against Barack Obama that Republican operatives can manufacture.

Roll the clock back to 2006, when the punditocracy saw apocalypse in Lieberman's impending primary defeat. Pundit "dean" David Broder bemoaned the "terrible tug" of a Ned Lamont victory. Slate's Jacob Weisberg complained that "the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad." Martin Peretz denounced the "thought-enforcers of the left," and Lanny Davis detected evidence of "liberal McCarthyism." These were polite ripostes compared with those heard on cable news, however, where CNN anchor Chuck Roberts termed Lamont "the Al Qaeda candidate" (before apologizing) and Fox's John Gibson explained, "The Khmer Rouge wing of the Democratic Party is making a bid for a complete takeover." And yet even these comments somehow paled in comparison with the complaints of The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, who decried the "pack of crazed, ignorant ideological cannibals"--a description he attributed to "Lieberman's Allies"--"fanatics" operating on the basis of a "paranoid, Manichean worldview brimming with humorless rage"--a characterization he embraced as his own.

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