So do I. Now I'm even more anxiously awaiting my copy of Boehlert's Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush book at my local library. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article.
Equally far-fetched is the assumption that a candidate in Connecticut will impact races in the other 49 states. Since when do voters in Oregon, for instance, vote in retaliation for whom citizens in Arizona elect in their primary? Perhaps that was true when the renegade candidate was KKK honcho and Republican David Duke. But Lamont is a multi-millionaire and fourth-generation Harvard graduate. Why would voters in Tennessee be concerned about Lamont, let alone care about him? There's absolutely no proof that the choice Connecticut Democrats made Tuesday is going to influence elections around the country. No proof, that is, other than the fact that the Republican National Committee's Ken Mehlman says it's so.
But what I think is essential to understanding the Lieberman media phenomena is that, for the most part, the pundits who assailed Lamont's rise during the campaign were the same ones who signed off on the disastrous war in Iraq and now appear spooked that voters in Connecticut finally decided to hold Lieberman, the de facto Democratic co-sponsor of the invasion, responsible for that foreign policy debacle. They're spooked because for the last three-plus years there's been something of a gentleman's agreement that nobody inside the Beltway, whether at the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, or inside the corporate media world, has been asked to pay any sort of professional price for backing the disaster that is Iraq. But suddenly Democrats in the Nutmeg state have decided enough's enough. That's not a trend Beltway insiders want to see spread nationally, which is why so many pundits were eager to marginalize Lamont and his anti-war backers as "crazies" and "elitist" "bomb throwers."
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