Lefty Wingnut "Joe Bashing" Goes Over the Edge

Former Democratic, and now Independent, Senator Joe Lieberman endorsed fellow Senator John McCain for President last week. "Fighting Joe" is now actively campaigning for Senator McCain in New Hampshire. The left-wing of the Democratic Party has not been amused. Liberal attacks on Joe Lieberman are nothing new, but as noted by The Jewish Daily Forward, the leftist fever swamp has gone way over the edge this time:

In other times, charges of Israeli plotting, Jewish disloyalty and Zionist control of Washington crept lamely into public discourse, only to be ignored or ridiculed by the mainstream. This week, claims of Jewish treachery were a mainstream thread in nearly every online discussion of the Lieberman-McCain brouhaha.

The claims appeared repeatedly, insistently, in the talkback sections of the most respectable news and opinion Web sites, from The Huffington Post and Think Progress to CNN, The Atlantic and AOL News. Saner discussants challenged them, for the most part, not contemptuously but respectfully, as though these were unremarkable, unobjectionable views.

Keep in mind that the Forward is hardly a neo-conservative mouthpiece. Founded as a New York Yiddish daily in 1897 by Abraham Cahan, its roots were in the Eastern European Jewish immigrant labor union and socialist movements, and in many ways it remains true to those political roots 110 years later. Still, there is something very ugly growing on the American political far left, and the Forward is to be praised for speaking out against it, even if that means taking some of its usual political allies to task.