Poor Joe Lieberman and the Liberal Inquisition

David Brooks rants about The Liberal Inquisition in the New York Times July 9 (Times Select). I don't get Brooks and never have. He is a conservative. He often argues points that defy logic.

Here he holds up Lieberman as a poor victim of the liberals. Only wait. He claims Joe is the quintessential liberal. Why then is poor Joe subject to the L. I.? Because by supporting the war he fails the liberal litmus test. Poor, poor Joe.

Brooks. What are you talking about? If Joe is such a liberal guy, why are you so sympathetic? And pul-ease. Inquisition is a Republican idea! So here is some of the screed, which really truly makes no sense at all:

What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition.

What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.

Next has come the effort to expel Lieberman from modern liberalism. In a dark parody of the old struggle between Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, the highly educated, highly affluent, highly Caucasian wing of the Democratic Party has turned liberalism from a philosophy into a secular religion, and then sought to purge a battle-scarred warhorse on the grounds of insufficient moral purity.

So these days, for example, one hears that Lieberman is a crypto-conservative, a Bible-Belter. In reality, of course, this is a man who has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign. He has a Christian Coalition rating of 0.

But a lifetime's record is deemed not to matter any longer. For in the midst of the inquisition all of American liberalism has been reduced to one issue, the war. Just as some edges of the pro-life movement reduce all of conservatism to abortion, the upscale revivalists on the left reduce everything to Iraq, and all who are deemed impure must be cleansed away.