Joe Lieberman’s stunning loss to a political neophyte for his own party’s Senate nomination is widely being blamed on the blogosphere. Pro-Iraq war incumbent senator Lieberman lost out in Connecticut’s Democratic primary to multimillionaire but still darling-of-the-liberal-blogosphere Ned Lamont.
You’d think that Lieberman’s plight would result in the knives being retracted, but you’d be wrong. The blogosphere is a vicious as ever to the former Vice Presidential candidate. I must admit it’s fun to read the liberal blogs today, which are infused with joyous hoots and hollers at how the “war-loving” Democrat has been tossed into the streets by the people, the voters.
Jonathan Singer at MyDD leads with this wonderfully wicked quote from Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:
“This shows what blind loyalty to George Bush and being his love child means. […] This is not about the war. It’s blind loyalty to Bush.”
David Sirota at The Huffington Post sounds rather high and mighty about it all, but that’s OK given that most of these people have been powerless over the past seven years and Lieberman’s defeat is pumping joy juice into the progressive wing of the Democratic Party (much to the dismay of Republican campaign strategists).
This is an incredible victory tonight. Ordinary people showed that no politician - even a snake like Lieberman with every single advantage - is above American democracy.
Deranged with happiness is Markos (Kos) Moulitsas Zúniga of The Daily Kos, who has been chewing on Lieberman’s raw flesh in his blog for months now. He, like so many of the other bloggers, is high on democracy today because Lieberman had the political establishment (including some Republicans) behind him, but the voters picked Lamont.
What tonight showed is that democracy can work. That even the most powerful, entrenched forces can be dislodged by people-power. That the combined mights of the Democratic and Conservative establishments couldn’t hold the gates against the barbarian intruders.
None of this answers, really, whether the liberal blogosphere actually toppled Lieberman (who, btw, plans to run as an independent, which is partly why the knives are still out.) Oddly enough, CNET’s Declan McCullagh offers more insight on this question than do all the high-profile liberal bloggers responsible for Lieberman’s fall from, well if not grace, somewhere better than where Lieberman is right now. Even Declan, however, waffles.
So what eventually led to Lieberman’s primary loss on Tuesday? Was it the “netroots” or Connecticut voters deciding they didn’t need any more “Joementum?”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:09 AM | Print | Comments (0)
It’s hard to say. Few Democrats support the war in Iraq anyway (a CBS News poll last month found that 89 percent of Dems disapprove of Bush’s handling of it), so it’s not a stretch to conclude that Lieberman’s aggressive hawkishness doomed him from the start. Then again, turning Lamont v. Lieberman into a national news story didn’t hurt.
AOL’s release of search queries made by 600,00+ users is still reverberating. The latest bit of outrage over this privacy leak comes in the form of user No. 4417749, otherwise identified from the AOL data as Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, GA. Unfortunately for AOL,she was identified by two New York Times reporters, Michael Barbaro and Tom Zeller.
This we know about Ms. Arnold: she’s interested in “numb fingers,” “60 single men” and “dog that urinates on everything.” Not really damning, but nonetheless spooky to Ms. Arnold.
Ms. Arnold, who agreed to discuss her searches with a reporter, said she was shocked to hear that AOL had saved and published three months’ worth of them. “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life,” she said. [Note: Let’s hope it’s not her whole personal life.] “I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.”
What’s AOL’s response? Well, basically, tough noogies for Ms. Arnold.
Asked about Ms. Arnold, an AOL spokesman, Andrew Weinstein, reiterated the company’s position that the data release was a mistake. “We apologize specifically to her,” he said. “There is not a whole lot we can do.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:34 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Mr. Weinstein said he knew of no other cases thus far where users had been identified as a result of the search data, but he was not surprised. “We acknowledged that there was information that could potentially lead to people being identified, which is why we were so angry.”
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