WafflesOh, fun! Anne-Marie Slaughter is back for more. You may recall that last week the delightful Ms. Slaughter wrote that “Partisans” had “Gone Wild,” complaining that

The fiercest battle is no longer between the left and the right but between partisanship and bipartisanship. The Bush administration, which has been notorious for playing to its hard-right base, has started reaching across the aisle, with its admirable immigration bill (even though it failed), with its new push for a diplomatic strategy toward North Korea and Iran, and above all with its choice of three seasoned moderates for important positions: Robert M. Gates as defense secretary, John D. Negroponte as deputy secretary of state and Robert B. Zoellick as World Bank president.

This of course attracted ridicule. The reason it attracted such ridicule is that it was ridiculous.

Well, here she is again, defending the ridiculous.

As if to prove the headline to my article in Outlook, angry attacks from the left have been plentiful this week online. (See here , here and here.) Reading these responses, it occurs to me that a lot of what goes on in the blogosphere is the verbal equivalent of road rage (although I take the point made on Democracy Arsenal that pundits need to develop thick skins).

“Road rage”? Hmmm. Well, I guess if you deliberately drive your clown car into a tractor-trailer filled with lemon meringue pies, and then everyone collapses in gales of helpless laughter as you emerge from the delicious, fiery wreck and Demand to Be Taken Seriously, all a-dripping in custard.. then I suppose Slaughter is the victim of “road rage” after all.

There’s a lot to snark at here, but as I am currently beating back a Toddler Uprising (don’t ask), I’ll confine myself to looking at this:

Another friend and mentor groaned at my suggestion that politicians seeking to push for real solutions to public policy problems publicly appear with someone from the other party, calling it wimpy girl stuff. The blogosphere prefers the increasingly standard pejorative of “kumbaya-ism.” The irony, of course, is that standing with folks on the other side of the aisle takes much more strength and courage than standing on your side and lobbing epithets across. Republicans need that courage more than Democrats — on immigration, global warming, torture, wiretapping — the list goes on. But Democrats need it too — above all on how to get out of Iraq and on how to continue and intensify the use of diplomacy to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.

“Wimpy girl stuff”…? And this is from your “mentor”? Explains a lot.

Look, we don’t condemn preening jackasses like Joe Lieberman for being “girlish” when they decide to, oh, I don’t know, attend GOP strategy sessions. That would be inane and sexist.

We condemn it because such behavior has helped to legitimize stupid wars and torture.

It hasn’t required “courage” for Lieberman to do this. Having a lot of people who hang out on blogs think you’re a dick is not really much of a cross to bear, after all — not if you dig the DC Party Circuit, getting drooled over on the idiot Sunday AM blabberfests, and being praised to the skies by the Elite Punditry for your “principles.” No, aisle-crossing has been the default position for Democrats for too damn long. And it hasn’t worked. In a rather spectacular fashion.

It’s really not all that difficult a point to grasp.

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