Contributed by: filbert Tuesday, August 08 2006 @ 09:28 AM CST
My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.As Mr. Davis notes in his OpinionJournal article, he is relating some of the milder invective tossed his way by the out-of-control leftists who are very close to taking over the Democratic Party. You can get a taste of the rhetoric by browsing some of the discussions at Daily Kos[*2] or (especially) at Democratic Underground[*3] . A reasonable person will see that the discussion there is light-years more nasty and mean-spirited than on sites such as Free Republic[*4] or Townhall[*5] .
This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing--in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against "communists and their fellow travelers." The word "McCarthyism" became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right's fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a "communist" or "socialist" who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.
I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years--with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage--I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.
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