first Jonathan Alter is making sense

Lieberman's problems began long before he was kissed by President Bush at last year's State of the Union. With his Senate seat safe, he didn't have to fight in 2000. He went easier on Dick Cheney in their vice presidential debate than he did a few weeks back against fellow Democrat Lamont. During the Florida recount, he made a point of favoring military absentee ballots likely to be Republican. Lieberman has voted 90 percent of the time with the Democrats—but his first impulse is often to find fault with them. His 2004 run for the White House was better known for its attacks on fellow Democrats than on the incumbent. He approved of Washington intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. On Iraq, he buys the GOP argument that equates criticism of the commander in chief with hurting the troops, which means no real oversight. (Has he forgotten the Truman Committee during World War II?) The duty of the opposition is to oppose.

and then, well, he isn't

The bloggers who have noisily intervened deny they're interested in ideological purity. They point to their support in Senate races for pro-life candidates. But on Iraq, the liberal blogs brook no dissent.

Don't we?

I believe Mr. Alter is familiar with our Junior Senator from New York, or at least familiar enough to announce on Imus that she has "more baggage than Paris Hilton on the Riviera" (meeow, dear).

Liberals aren't all that excited about her stand on the war either

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) drew boos and hisses from an audience of liberal activists yesterday as she defended her opposition to a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, and later she received an implicit rebuke from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for failing to acknowledge that her support for the war was a mistake.

and, in fact, as Alter himself points out, the Senator (who has been annointed by the pundit class much against our inclination to be the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for '08) holds a position on the war not all that different than Lieberman's. As he doesn't point out, she also has an anti-war primary opponent who's (from our crazed perspective) far better on labor issues.

Not just that, he's a liberal blogger (OK, he's also a journalist, but we forgive him, for as the head of the Writer's Union he was the lead plaintiff who got prominent media war supporters the New York Times and TimeWarner whupped by the Supreme Court).

Sounds like a pretty tempting occasion for one of our crazed ideological purges, don't you think?

Maybe not so much.



The lion's share of that money was raised at ActBlue.com, an online political fundraising site liberal bloggers use to support candidates.

Check out the groundswell



So why are liberal bloggers lining up behind Lieberman's opponent and not Hillary's?

Just a guess, but I think it may be because

With his Senate seat safe, he didn't have to fight in 2000. He went easier on Dick Cheney in their vice presidential debate than he did a few weeks back against fellow Democrat Lamont. During the Florida recount, he made a point of favoring military absentee ballots likely to be Republican. Lieberman has voted 90 percent of the time with the Democrats—but his first impulse is often to find fault with them. His 2004 run for the White House was better known for its attacks on fellow Democrats than on the incumbent. He approved of Washington intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. On Iraq, he buys the GOP argument that equates criticism of the commander in chief with hurting the troops, which means no real oversight. (Has he forgotten the Truman Committee during World War II?) The duty of the opposition is to oppose.

It's good to know we have Mr. Alter behind us on that.

As usual, a few years behind us.