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.