Marty Peretz is feeling particularly bitter and vindictive today. He goes after Ned Lamont and leftists in the Wall Street Journal. He gets personal.
It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.
He calls Corliss Lamont our “most “high-born American Stanlist”. I wonder, is that fair?
Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902 – April 26, 1995), was a humanist philosopher and civil liberties advocate. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey to Thomas W. Lamont, a Partner and later Chairman at J.P. Morgan & Co.. Lamont graduated as valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, and magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. In 1924 he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford, while he resided with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont matriculated at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928 he became a philosophy instructor at Columbia and married Margaret Hayes Irish. He received his Ph.D. in 1932. Dr. Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research (see New School University).
Lamont’s political views were socialist. During the 1930s he was sympathetic to Soviet communism, but never joined the Communist Party, and later came to reject his earlier views. In 1953 he published a pamphlet entitled Why I am not a Communist.
A leading proponent of civil rights, he served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932 to 1954, and subsequently as chairman until his death, of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy’s senate subcommittee and other government agencies. In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General. In 1973 he discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI had been tapping his phone, and scrutinizing his tax returns and cancelled checks for 30 years. His subsequent lawsuit showed the surveillance had no justification in law, and set precedent for other citizens’ privacy rights. He also filed and won a suit against the Central Intelligence Agency for opening his mail.
Sounds like he was a socialist. Kind of like Rep. Bernie Sanders of the great state of Vermont. It looks like he flirted with Communism in the 1930’s, but repudiated those beliefs, even going so far as to write the famous pamphlet Why I am not a Communist. But don’t think he is going to be satisfied with smearing Corliss Lamont as a Stalinist, because he gets George McGovern too.
George McGovern, a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling habits, never could shake the altogether accurate analogies with Henry Wallace. (Wallace was the slightly dopey vice president, dropped from the ticket by FDR in 1944, who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, a creation of Stalin’s agents in the U.S.) Mr. McGovern’s trouncing by Richard Nixon, a reprobate president if we ever had one, augured the recessional–if not quite the collapse–of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War was not the Soviets but us.
Nice. Peace candidates are all Soviet agents, and the blogosphere secretly works for al-Qaeda.
The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont’s will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective.
Do we really have to go to the archives to show you that the criticisms of the war from Left Blogistan are not retrospective? Does Peretz not understand that opposition to the war (before it started) pretty much created the blogosphere?
If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.
First of all, it is total horseshit to equate the center with people that put “an emphasis on national strength”. Peretz puts an emphasis on raw aggression in the Middle East. Those two things are not synonymous, no matter how easily they can conflated in the minds of the electorate. If grinding our armed forces and credibility and budget down to the bone in Iraq is a projection of national strength, then I’m Brad Pitt. And, yes, this was all predicted by Left Blogistan.
One more thing, Marty. Since you and many of your TNR buddies insist on casting charges of anti-Semitic sentiments at principled critics of Israel’s policies, why should I give you the benefit of the doubt on this?
The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove’s dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.
Would you like it if I suggested you hate black people?
And don’t be so sure that we can’t get to Hillary.
