On The CT Primary

The Ham Hock of Liberty: Attention Pundits

The link takes you to an excellent post to some blogger NIM, which has also gotten a lot of attention at Kos and Eschaton. NIM is responding to the kind of vituperative media commentary from the likes of Chait, Klein, Siegel and Cohen toward the liberal net/grass roots effort to replace Joe Lieberman with Ned Lamont. These pundits are of the opinion that it is a kind of growing fascism that there exists the popular movement to replace Sen. Lieberman.

However, all that is happening is that a lot of people, including a large number from the state of Connecticut, are expressing their opinion by letter, newspaper article and yes the Internet, that Joe Liberman is a poor choice for Democratic Senator from the state of Connecticut. To those of us in the net/grass roots, this is simply freedom of speech and democracy in action. This is not remotely fascism. Now on the other hand we believe that things like stripping voter roles of people who are likely to vote for your opponent, arranging that there be few voting machines in districts that support your opponent, failing to register people in the opposition party on a technicality involving the weight of card stock used for the registration request, sending workers to the polls to challenge every voter in districts where your opponent has strong support, these things (things which have provoked much milder reactions in the above mentioned pundits) resemble fascism.

So to sum up:
pundits believe that

1. Wishing to not reelect your Senator is fascism
2. Stripping people of their right to vote to win an election is a minor error

liberal bloggers believe that

1. Wishing to not reelect your Senator is democracy in action
2. Stripping people of their right to vote is an intolerable assault on democracy

Guess which group I think is sane and which is nuts.