Richard Cohen is getting hammered out there on the blogs, mostly in response to a column he wrote chastising Hillary Clinton for not speaking out about the MoveOn "General Betray Us" ad. In response, lefty anger-bloggers like Atrios have started dragging up old dirt to hit back. This is below-the-belt "freak show politics" at its best. It recalls a column from Cohen from last year in which he named this trend, and its likely result:
"...the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.
The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls."
I know in politics you've got to get the base fired up, and maybe the angry contingent on the left is an inevitable symptom of that. Perhaps that's why Newt is predicting a Democratic victory at 80-20 odds. Maybe, as some have argued, the radical left is good for the Democrats. But it seems to me that this anger is net net a bad thing for the Democratic party. It is corrosive, and it pulls the party away from responsibility, competence, and civility into vendettas, lists of enemies and true believers, and score settling. That's no perspective from which to govern, as this administration has demonstrated.