Fine Metaphors Abound

Whether or not the entrenched Democratic establishment truly fears the uprising against Lieberman or is trying to stop a movement they fear they may end up fearing, in the message sent in their hysterical reaction - that the littles need to remain little - they exactly demonstrate what Conservatives say is the Democratic Party’s attitude toward, say, African-Americans. It provides me a personal insight into the meme of the Democratic intellectual bigot who knows better than his constituency what his constituency wants and needs. In exchange for my dependable vote they’ll look after my interests, which, Lordy knows, I don’t know how to do for myself.

I myself thought better of Lieberman longer than most of my friends and the people I read. I actually do - and so do most of my friends and the people I read - think that the Democratic Party needs honorable hawks, far more hawkish than me, hawks that may sometimes support policies I passionately disagree with but whose position I can respect because he respects my disagreement. What I don’t want is a hawk of my own party implying I’m a traitor for voicing my opposition, especially when he’s fully aware that the propagandists on the other side are joyfully employing his implication to state as a state fact that my opposition is treasonous.

The Right’s opinion-spouters are gleefully declaring a revolution on the Left, with inquisitions and kangaroo courts and public executions to come. As of yet, I’ve heard no calls for the breaking of Lieberman on the wheel and have yet to see executioners blocks delivered to town squares. For the opinion-spouters of my party to trot out their Lanny Davises and the ultra-icky Marshall Wittman (The Dog says The Moose is a Tool) to echo rightwing talkingpoints is to amplify, as only the media can, exactly why we are infuriated at the current state of American culture and politics. There is something terribly wrong, terribly disheartening, and potentially crippling if not potentially fatal in domestic and international politics right now. To scream at an entrenched elite, of either party, who either honestly believe that the policies that brought us to this point are worth continuing (to give them the benefit of the doubt) or whose only concern is to maintain whatever power they have no matter what the consequences, does not make us mud-caked sod-farmers screaming to burn a witch.

The irony is that if Joe Lieberman had declared, once the Lamont candidacy began to look to viable, that he would honor the results of the Connecticut primary regardless of the outcome, he’d probably have won relatively easily AND diminished the threat of the growing influence of the grassroots Left and the blogofascists. There are some anti-Joes that became and would remain anti-Joes no matter what, but for some us the final proof of Lieberman’s apostasy was his choice to proclaim, behind some morality of imperiousness and entitlement, that he’d run as an independent if democracy let him down. Nothing could have reminded the activist Left more of how the Democratic Party considers that Left as nothing but nuisances. Donating nuisances, voting nuisances, sometimes useful nuisances, but noisy, embarrassing nuisances nonetheless.

Here is the irony of establishment Washington’s fainting vapors over the anti-Joe revolution: Nothing could have granted the grassroots Left more legitimacy and power. The more the establishment bitches and protests, the more they make it so.