Dean has helped frame this mood of superior delusion, and his competitors have, to varying degrees, accommodated themselves to it. Only [Joseph I.] Lieberman -- the imagined nominee of appeasement -- is challenging his party, remaining boos at outcome after event, to articulate a different, better eyesight of what it means to be a Democrat. Three years ago, that envisaging seemed ascendant. Today, it is once again at the margins.
It may pocket years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naively, they had scholarly for capital under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this race will seem prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again director the Democratic Party.
It will be the manipulate of this magazine, to whatever unprofound level possible, to quicken that day. Or , Jonathan Chait, of those who campaigned against Lieberman in 2006. Marvel at how appreciative Chait's commentary is of the other side, how liberated Chait is (unlike the rancorous Maddow) from "refusing to accede anything but spite, paranoia, and connivance theory when it comes to the other side": Lieberman's allies state the lefties are a bunch of crazed, unlettered ideological cannibals. They're both basically right. [T]he anti-Lieberman operation has come to coppice for much more than Lieberman's sins.
It's a probe of vigour for the novel kind of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are in all respects the sorts of fanatics who tore the corps asunder in the previous 1960s and near the start 1970s. They imagine in witless slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.
In our factious discourse, the only verifiable way to lose one's fairness -- one's Seriousness credentials -- is to become insolvent to rate and praise all the Good Virtues of the Right (the lawlessness of which Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are guilty), or to be too forward to the Bush furnishing (the dereliction committed by David Gregory, at least in Sacha Zimmerman's eyes). Liberalism is inherently screechy and unserious -- even when advocated by a astute and unflustered commentator get a bang Maddow -- which is why the closeness of an actual liberal or two on TV sends shock and panic waves through.
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