From Joe Klein, blogging at Time:
"But the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable...
The spitballs aimed at me don't matter much. The spitballs aimed at Harman, Clinton and Obama are another story. Despite their votes, each of those politicians believes the war must be funded. (Obama even said so in his statement explaining his vote.) Each knows, as Senator Jim Webb has said repeatedly, that we must be more careful getting out of Iraq than we were getting in. But they allowed themselves to be bullied into a more simplistic, more extreme position.
Courage.
6/9/07 1600: I focused on a different aspect of this section, the spinelessness of the candidates. The portion truncated form the tail of the first paragraph, however, points to another area of silliness. Kim Priestap at Wizbang! noticed it, as did Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. From the latter:
Note to TIME Magazine columnist Joe Klein: suck it up, Joe. Some of us have been targets of the insane bile that pours out of the left-wing blogosphere for years. It didn’t just start recently, and it’s not unusual or rare. The left-wing haze in which you live parted for a second and you saw what the Nutroots are really like. Welcome to the reality-based real world.
6/9/07 1625: And a much longer, and perceptive, take at Right Wing Nuthouse, from Terry Moran's brother:
For Klein to blame the left’s historic, hate-filled rhetoric on the recent phenomena of talk radio and specifically Limbaugh’s broadly drawn (and at times, over the top) satire is fantastically ridiculous. The world did not begin in the 1990’s with the right’s reaction to the deliberate Clintonian strategy of personally destroying your opponent with outrageous smears and lies. It’s just that the left has now perfected the technique and uses the world of blogs to vastly amplify the tactic so that the target feels beseiged.
