Joe Lieberman and the late Democratic Party

Over at TPM Cafe Mark Schmitt takes a look at Joe Lieberman. Go read the entire thing by I'm going to quote a couple of paragraphs that I think are significant as they relate to the state of the Democratic party.

It seems to me that Lieberman is following the path, quite literally, of the neo-conservatives - not the Rumsfeldian nationalists who incorrectly wear that label now, but the original neo-cons of the 1960s, driven to the right above all by their irritation at the left, often based on domestic politics. (Hence the title of this post, an allusion to one of the most famous original documents of the neocons, Norman Podhoretz’s 1967 essay, “My Negro Problem - And Ours”.)

Is that enough of a reason to oppose Lieberman? Sure, because it’s a huge error on one of the most fundamental questions of our time. It’s an error not of policy or of political loyalty, but of attitude. And it is not an error that I see others making. I heard Ed Kilgore today, on a bloggingHeads sequence, argue that if “the bloggers” come for Lieberman today, tomorrow they’ll go after Steny Hoyer or Hillary Clinton. I can’t speak for everyone, but while I have disagreements with Clinton and probably Hoyer, I’ve never heard them say things as deeply offensive to my sense of what democracy and patriotism requires as I’ve heard from Lieberman recently.

It's not just Lieberman of course but the DLC and DC Democrat mindset that we see and hear daily from the likes of Marshall Wittmann. This mindset is contrary to the very foundation of the progressive (netroots) ideology. As a result if the DLC crowd manage to maintain control of the Democratic party the netroots activists will not be active in the party and many will once again believe that Nader was correct when he said there was no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. The DLC crowd has made it clear they cannot be part of an antiwar, anti free trade that benefits only large corporations. The Democratic Party is not only a minority party it is really two minority parties. Good news for the Republicans.