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Over in the Washington Post today, Harold Meyerson takes a swipe at Joe Lieberman for some seemingly "undemocratic" comments. Lieberman claimed in an interview that his position on the Iraq War, "is a challenge for the party -- whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line." Meyerson calls that a "stunning assertion" because if "parties were based on the acceptance of diversity of opinion on the most important issues of the day, they would lack the definition to be parties at all." He concludes, "Lieberman's problem is not that he faces expulsion from a sect but that he has chosen to stand outside what remains a big, messy tent of a party."

But when it comes to the GOP and tax cuts, Meyerson sings a very decidedly different tune. When Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich are attacked by the administration and groups like the Club for Growth for failing to back the Bush tax cuts, the good Senators' problem isn't that they "stand outside" a big tent of a party. As Meyerson wrote in LA Weekly, they were subjected to "the same kind of over-the-top vilification it had hitherto reserved for Democrats." He accused the neocons of being "at their Jacobin moment":

…they have dispatched the ancien régime and the constitutionalists like Lafayette. Now they must turn on their Dantons and Marats, their fellow revolutionaries who have failed to get with the Jacobin program. All prudent Republicans must now swear allegiance to Wolfowitz and Rove.

So, when Senator Lieberman is being attacked for his pro-War position, it's not that he is being subject to over the top vilification by the likes of MoveOn.org or DailyKos. It's democracy. But when Snowe and Voinovich are attacked for not supporting tax cuts, the attackers are the equivalent of guillotine-happy folks of the French Revolution.

I wish I could say it took a lot of work to track down Meyerson's hypocrisy. Yet all I had to do was type his name and "Club for Growth" into Google. Smacking the left for hypocrisy is about as difficult as shooting fish in the ol' barrel. And if it wasn't so much fun, I'd stop doing it.

topics:
Constitution, Law, Iraq, NATO