It’s Primary Day…
…in Connecticut, and Lanny Davis is appalled at what his friend Joe Lieberman has been subjected to:
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.
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.
Well, welcome to the real world, Lanny – you haven’t seen hate until you get a hardcore progressive talking about the Bush administration (but it was Reagan before that – Lanny needs to get out of the cocoon more).
Lanny details some of the extreme anti-Lieberman sentiments found on Kos and Huff’n'Puff (looks like one of my top ten lists – hmmm, that gives me an idea) before concluding:
I do not blame Joe Lieberman’s political difficulties on the liberal blogosphere. Most Connecticut Democrats voting for Mr. Lamont are genuinely outraged at President Bush for his Iraq War policies. They are entitled to express that outrage by voting for him and against Sen. Lieberman on that basis alone, although Sen. Lieberman’s record as a progressive Democrat and his opposition to President Bush not only on most domestic issues but also on the conduct of the war cannot be disputed–despite egregiously distortive ads paid for by Mr. Lamont with $4 million of his own money.
Moreover, the support he gets from these haters should not be attributed to Mr. Lamont–nor should he be blamed for their extremism, bigotry and intolerance. But he ought to denounce them. He hasn’t as yet.
I’ll go you one better, Lanny – he ought not to lie about his prominent association with one of the biggest haters, and he ought to publicly disassociate himself from her. Should Lamont win today, he should realize that this issue is not going away…
(hat tip to topsecretk9)…
Democrats: Like old times
Karl Rove is excited:
“We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue “peace candidates,” and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en…
Davis’s examples of “intolerance” are pretty mild, especially given that he had all of the blogosphere to draw from. If anything, that his selections likely represent the worst he could find, it reinforces that the left isn’t shot through with the kind of hatred that pulses like blood through the body politic of the right.
jpe’s point aside, Davis also falls victim to using the comments on prominent left-wing blogs to represent mainstream liberalism. When will that fallacy end?
jpe, puh-leese…have you ever wandered around the comment sections of Kos, Huff’n'Puff, or firedoglake? Davis did a crappy job with selection, that’s all – he should have called me…
Fargus, I must say I completely disagree with your interpretation here – Davis is the epitome of mainstream liberalism. He is trying to draw a distinction between the mainstream and the haters of the ‘progressive’ left…
I have to agree with jpe and Fargus. Davis culls four random quotes from the comment section of a few blogs and then uses them to make generalizations about left wing “bloggers.” That’s just entirely dishonest. If he wants to make a point about some of people who read left wing blogs, fine (though query whether the crazy commenters are representative of the readership of most blogs; most blog readers never comment). But to someone not already very familiar with the blogosphere, his column suggests that the exerpts he’s quoting are representative of the bloggers who are backing Lamont. They’re not. It’s a very deceptive column.
With all due respect, it’s not a very deceptive column at all…do you deny the level of hatred and venom directed at Joe Lieberman? Do you think it’s appropriate (I’m not talking about opposing him, I’m talking about calling him “Rape Gurney Joe” and putting him in blackface and all the other things you know damn well have gone on?).
This professed innocence of knowledge of just what Davis is talking about is not worthy of you guys, really…
Well, let’s stick with the bloggers themselves. How about Lamont’s commercial co-star, “Screw them” Kos? Or Lamont’s director, Jane “Rape Gurney Joe” and “Blackface Lieberman” Hamsher.
If anything, I think Davis was understating the problem with the quotes he chose. You don’t have to spend very long on those sites to see how driven they are by pure hatred, from the bloggers to the commenters.
Sorry Mark, great minds think alike and all…
Hey, glad to see someone that’s not in denial…
“…that his selections likely represent the worst he could find, it reinforces that the left isn’t shot through with the kind of hatred that pulses like blood through the body politic of the right.”
If you really believe that, then you must have a serious motor skill impairment with the hand that’s attached to your dominant arm. Just scroll through the last week’s postings at Kos or the Huffington Post, and you’ll see the kind of vile statements that was previously assumed to be in the province of the neo – Nazi subculture. Davis inevitably chose the mildest comments he could find, but with just enough invective to make his point – a clever slight of hand, but not too clever.
All I mean, Mark, is that if that material is there from the bloggers themselves, why not just do that? I may have been imprecise when I said “mainstream liberalism” and not something about the mainstream of lefty bloggers (though I’d challenge any conservative’s characterization of what he sees to be the epitome of mainstream liberalism), but why the emphasis on the comments? He’s clearly talking about the blogs, so talk about the blog posts. The comments are something different entirely. It’s a tactic that many, yourself included, Mark, fall victim to entirely too often. For instance, it wouldn’t be fair for me to dig through the comments at LGF and find all the most hateful rhetoric I could there and then claim that it was representative of right-wing bloggers.
Just did that, Mark, and virtually everything was pretty tame. There was some anger, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I didn’t see anything the lines of “[Person X], Rope: Some Assembly Required,” which is so commonplace on the right.
“Just did that…”
Um, no, you have to actually look at the archive and spend more than 3 minutes perusing them to understand what’s been going on there – too hard for you? Here’s a Huffington Post’s contributor who archived some of the more pleasant responses he received after one of his columns appeared there:
http://dannymiller.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/can_i_be_honest.html
Funny, it’s harder to find some of the more virulent comments there today, because she’s been furiously deleting them – here’s an archived sampling of some on just one day, about a year ago:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/06/24/national-dem-insiders-a_n_23705.html
The question must be asked: are you even looking for any comments at all, or just stating your uninformed opinion here?
The question is whether the cited comments are representative in any sense of the lefty blog community. A scan/spot check is sufficient for those purposes (one can do a spot check of lgf, for example, and realize they’re, by and large, insane).
Okay, I’ll grant you this much – it’s more common to find nutjobs among the commenters than among the posters. However, some very prominent bloggers – calling Jane Hamsher! – have put plenty of virulence on display right there in the posts themselves.
Alright, so a blogger can’t be associated with his/her comments (unfortunate, I’ve gotten a few very anti-Semitic commenters on here lately with the Lebanon situation) – we can agree on that…but Huffington, firedoglake, and Kos (and these are hugely prominent blogs, not obscurities) have plenty of loony tunes that post, not comment, hateful garbage routinely.
Are there idiots that post similar hateful trash on the right? Oh, you bet – but they’re not as prominent by a long shot (and Charles Johnson of LGF has never posted anything remotely like Jane Hamsher does on a routine basis – all the examples I have ever seen from LGF come from the comments alone)…
Regardless, we could go back and forth with counterexamples all day – if you’re looking for (a) an admission that not all liberal bloggers subscribe to these tactics, or (b) there are bad apples on the conservative side as well, I’m not going to deny either…
Does that invalidate Lanny Davis’s point? I don’t think it does…
This is whole Joe Lieberman victimization phenomenon is just plain silly. Yes, the big liberal bloggers don’t like Lieberman. They write many posts that are critical of him. But these posts aren’t the anti-semitic tirades Davis implies they are by dishonestly quoting a few random comments. The most caustic of the anti-Lieberman bloggers, Jane Hamsher, is just that, caustic. Not anti-semitic, not insane, and not even in the same universe as prominent right wing commentators like Ann Coulter.
Compare the treatment of Lieberman to the treatment virtually any Democrat receives from right wing blogs during elections. John Kerry endured far worse treatment than poor Joe is enduring. Cry me a river. If you actually read through the posts of those supporting Lamont, you’ll see that they are rarely angry. Heavily sarcastic yes, and unfair at times, but nothing that isn’t entirely run-of-the-mill in the world of politics.
lefty Blogger Steve Gilliard proves Lanny Davis’ point.
Vince Foster. Remember him, Lanny. Remember how the WSJ editorial page drove him to suicide
Lanny Davis should be ashmed of himself. Running to the people who drove his friend to blow his brains out. Remember how Bob Bartley smugly went on TV to wash his hands of the whole affair. Now, to save your friend Joe Lieberman, you run to their warm embrace, skipping over the puddles of blood of your late friend, well darkened spots after all this time.
Would you call using a mans dead friend as a political prop vile Jpe? I certainly do. btw Gilliard is the blogger who infamously posted the photoshopped image of Rep. Senatorial candidate Michael Steele in blackface and called him “Sambo”
of course you will argue that was ok because Gilliard is himself black.
Two phrases for you, Anonymous – “Rape Gurney Joe”, and Lieberman in blackface.
If that’s not Ann Coulter-ish tactics, then I don’t know what is.
Sorry, no sell…
OK, first of all, since it’s an op-ed he can’t cull an entire DUnderground thread that’s why he wrote
AND
And if the point is these cullings are comments, not actual bloggers sentiment THEN WHY ARE THEY NOT DELETED? There are gobs of comments a 1000 times worse just out there for the culling, if the actual bloggers don’t agree with the comments then they ought to delete them — AND I happen to know Hamsher has no problem deleting comments, since she deletes every single comment that does not lick her boots.
(UNLIKE say MArk, who allows alternative points of view)
You got that right – I tried to trackback to one of her posts once (with, of course, a highly critical post of my own) and it stayed up for maybe five minutes before she deleted it…
I will leave comments up, just FYI, that are pretty repulsive (including, as I mentioned, some anti-Semitic ones) as long as they aren’t (a) threatening to an individual as opposed to a group, or (b) excessively vulgar (of course, (b) would rule out 75% of the Kos, DU, Huff’n'Puff, and firedoglake’s comments sections)…
The point being, the leaving comments versus deleting offensive ones is one that I’ve gone back and forth on – it seems the only sure way to avoid the offensive ones is to disable them entirely…
Fargus writes:
Thank you. For anyone who is interested, I’m blogging now, at Jon Henke’s new group blog, and I discuss that salient point in more depth here.
Mark
I am not saying zero tolerance deletion, I am saying the comments are left with no other comment. If I were to leave a comment here that was very offensive, noxious, anti-semitic you would not let it just stand without some mention. If you felt it was just so overly offensive you’d delete with the disclaimer — That was a rotten comment, I am deleting it. Further, if it maybe didn’t rise to deletion, but offensively missed your blog post point you’d comment back that would make it pretty clear to other readers you don’t agree with the sentiment of my comment.
While I think it’s true bloggers shouldn’t be held responsible for the comment others leave on their blog, I do think bloggers have an obligation to define the distinction. So when a KOS diary goes up and a majority of the comments are anti-Semitic, if the diarist doesn’t correct or disclaim then readers have no other option but assume Diarist agrees and condones.
Got you – and I totally agree with that…with the small disclaimer that if you write at a blog that gets hundreds of comments on a post, even that may be difficult – but the principle is solid…
Readers have no other option? What about taking the words of the actual post into account rather than depending on the content of the comments, which may or may not reflect the intent of the post itself? Why should the reader have no other option than to assign the sentiment of the commenters to the poster himself?
Is the principle the same for anybody who starts, say, a messageboard discussion about a particular op-ed in a major newspaper, in a place where the op-ed’s author can access it? Comments reflect the opinions of the readers, and it’s not incumbent on bloggers to adopt any one style of response or moderation. As such, I think the only option a reader has, if he or she wants to be honest with him- or herself, is to take the blogger’s own words as representative of the blogger’s opinion.
Fargus
If you write a post and the majority of your readers interpret that post and leave comments that are bigoted, sorry but, if you don’t make it clear you don’t agree with the bigotry I just might think you agree with your readers.
Beside which, this is a stupid. The left can’t even come to terms with the bigoted comments themselves and to pretend there were only 4 lame examples Lanny Davis could come up with is denial. There are TONS of examples and unless or until the left deals with the inner anti-semitism others will read them and believe people think and feel that way – otherwise they wouldn’t WRITE it.
You’ve got to then accept the premise that those who are driven to comment are also representative of the readership at large of the blog in question. But most comments aren’t interpretations of the post, but reactions to it. As such, I don’t understand your point in the slightest, that they’re somehow representative of the post unless the blogger comes out and says they’re not.
Say, for instance, you had identical posts. One at a blog that allows comments, and one at a blog that doesn’t. Does the fact that commenting is allowed change the content of the post? Not in the slightest.
Isn’t Lanny Davis practicing “gotcha” politics by pointing out that there is hatred on both sides and thus liberals are all wrong in denoucing the hatred of the right? Is this irony or am I reading too much into that? Is calling Lamont a liar because of the blogger thing not “Gotcha” politics, Mark? I wonder what you’d think of Davis’ book…
Oh, crap, the irony of me doing the gotcha thing just hit me…
Of course, I didn’t write a book on the subject…
Mike, Lamont lies about his association with Hamsher and to call him on it is ‘gotcha’ politics? You lost me there…
Fargus
If you write a post about kittens and people leave a bunch of bigoted comments, I am not going to paint you with a brush based on that. But if you write a post about Israel and the comments are anti-semitic, if I don’t know you, I don’t think it’s unfair that other readers conclude, based on your HOSTING the comments, you condone the sentiment. (I am using “you” in the hypothetical, not saying “you” do this, just to be clear)
For example, Jason Leopold (under an alias) was leaving awful anti-Semitic comments about himself on right wing blogs. What was his point? To make it look as though rightwingers were leaving them, but the rightwing sites were “deleting” the comments and making a point to say “Stop with the anti-semitism”, the site owners could have left them up, after-all, they are just comments and not indicative of their views, but they felt an obligation and a personal repulsion with leaving comments like ” JL is a dirty jew, we should gas him” on THEIR blog.
And really, if say Ace of Spade just left all the awful Leopold comments up many readers would conclude he kinda agreed with the dirty jew stuff, and many on the left would question why he left them up, and you know it.
Maybe the anti-Semitism charge is an unfair broad brush, but based on the large amount of comments available, it’s evident there is a problem… the far left either doesn’t want to confront it or agrees with it.
Sorry, I still don’t buy it at all. You’re a big boy, and you can form your own opinion based on what the guy wrote. If you want to have an opinion of the commenters, by all means, do that. But it’s fundamentally wrongheaded to attribute others’ comments on the piece to the author of the piece itself. It just doesn’t make sense.
As for why they don’t delete them, different blogs have different policies for moderation of their comments. Some do almost no moderation at all, and that’s their choice. To me, it’s one that makes sense especially for a site that generates hundreds of comments per post within minutes.
Big girl.
There some merit to this, but of course, that is not what Davis meant. He was speaking to the tolerance and the real phenomenon that anti-Semitism is leaving the lips of “liberals’ – comments, blog posts, bullhorns at rallies, whatever…
which appears to be fundamentally lost on you.
Sorry about the gender confusion.
Nothing’s lost on me at all. What appears to be lost on you is that Davis’s piece certainly had the tone of attacking the liberal blogosphere at large using the evidence not of prominent liberal bloggers, but the almost-anonymous nobodies who comment on them. Again, if the attack was on the readers of liberal blogs, the piece would have made marginally more sense (if, that is, he could have convinced me that the commenters were somehow representative of the readership of those blogs at large).
“Not anti-semitic, not insane, and not even in the same universe as prominent right wing commentators like Ann Coulter.”
Gosh, I’m sure you’re right. I also assume you think the Tooth Fairy still exists and that Karl Rove is planning on taking over the world next year. Try a little research, please – no one can make this claim with a straight face (but perhaps you were smirking when you typed it).
“But it’s fundamentally wrongheaded to attribute others’ comments on the piece to the author of the piece itself.”
OK – you’re the New York Times. In response to an article, many readers write in with a good dose of virulent notions. Should they print them all? Of course not, because then the majority of their audience would tend to correlate the letters page with the paper itself. You’re abdicating any responsibiltiy on the part of the site owners themselves. That’s not grown – up, that’s patently infantile.
There’s a fundamental difference between print media and the internet. I didn’t think I’d have to make that point, but it appears you can’t see the difference.
OF COURSE that is not a problem, I just have this dumbass need to proclaim my gender!
Well, I don’t know but the anti-semitism is alive and kicking on the left and so whether the prominent writers are writing it or not, does not erase the fact, that it is there and showing up on liberal blogs. Seems to me you want to proffer that because the actual traffic getting blogs haven’t actually written anything anti-Semitic, this allows you to ignore and discount the anti-semitism the traffic givers leave.
And again, that’s a different point (although I might quibble with you if you’re equating anti-Semitism with not supporting Israel fully, but you haven’t said that, and that’s another story). There are commenters that are full of hate. Sure. But the implicit comparison to Michael Savage, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh leaves the impression that Davis is talking about people far more influential than, say, folks who are, by and large, killing time at work.
“There’s a fundamental difference between print media and the internet.
Strike as non – responsive. How about trying a different tactic next time, like actually answering the question? Why are you in favor of total abdication on the part of site owners as pertaining to what their commenters post on their blogs? Should hate speech be completely unregulated in this medium, or is your Tourette’s Syndrome/cheap fallback position that “there’s a fundamental difference?” If so, let’s hear all about the fundamental differences that you sagely pointed out above.
BTW, Jeff Goldstein has officially engaged the FBI to investigate physical threats made on his blog (“Protein Wisdom”) to his wife and children by a former college professor. The FBI agreed that the threat should be taken seriously, and should be investigated immediately. In your perfect world of the internet, should this have been ignored at will? Because after all, accrording to your professorial tome, “there’s a fundamental difference.” Let’s hear it – all of it.
I’m talking technology-wise. If you’re talking about NYTimes.com or something, that’s a different story, clearly. Space concerns would make it idiotic for the NY Times to ever entertain publishing all reactions to its stories.
As for site owners’ responsibility, if they want to heavily moderate their comments, I don’t have a problem with that. But if they don’t, absent something directly threatening or harmful or something (like, for instance, posting the home addresses and phone numbers of people who disagree with you), then no, I don’t think they’re accountable for what people have to say about their posts.
Another implication of Davis’s article that’s particularly troubling to me is the implication that all of the commenters on these blogs are in lockstep, in terms of their opinions. But I’ve seen several heated arguments between commenters there. Should one side be deleted because the blog’s author doesn’t agree with it? I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the author to do that, no.
Christ, dmac, drop the high and mighty bit. It’s ugly. And I happened to address your point in my post above. Let’s try to keep it at least a little civil, k?
“I didn’t think I’d have to make that point, but it appears you can’t see the difference.”
No problem, as long as you drop your condescension.