Genius Envy: War on Terror, No! War on “Conservadems,” Yes!

David Horowitz's NewsRealblog ^ | 17 December, 2009 | Ben Johnson

[Michael van der Galien]

Leftists who decried the War on Terror now use the same terminology to describe center-Left members of their own party. On last night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Ed Schultz interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel about President Obama’s “sellout” on the health care bill. Katrina complained Obama’s is “a White House which has emboldened the conservadems, people like Joe Lieberman” who “is now holding hostage” socialized medicine. She repeated the elocution moments later while appealing to “citizens who don’t want to be held hostage by the insurance companies.” Schultz thanked her for appearing, adding, “Always the truth coming from you and The Nation.”

The truth is Katrina used language about Joe Lieberman she would be hesitant to apply to Islamist terrorists. In a 2004 Nation editorial entitled “Dissent is Patriotic,” vanden Heuvel faulted Republicans for saying the Party of Defeat’s characteristic rhetoric “emboldened the enemy,” accusing the GOP of breeding “a culture of fundamentalism and intolerance.” (But Katrina has had consistency troubles before.) The domestic Left sees far greater danger from conservatives than jihadists and apportions its disdain accordingly.

This ignores a cardinal reality about Joe Lieberman: he is not a conservative. I substantiated this beyond doubt in 2006, when the New York Times quoted another Lieberman critic: then-Congressman Rahm Emmanuel.

Emanuel, who ran the Democrats’s House campaigns that year, referred to Lieberman as George W. Bush’s “love child.” (If ever a phrase called out for the rejoinder “Where’s the birth certificate?” that is the one.) I wrote at the time: