Fire Dog Lake's Jane Hamsher gaffed with her graphic of Lieberman in blackface. Meanwhile Lieberman has hired people to incite violence. Note the unbalanced right wing coverage that discusses one, but not the other. Note how Joe Lieberman can paper the state with race baiting and hire people to commit assault and battery, and it doesn't move the needle at the pro-War Post and it's wholly owned media subsidiaries.

Clearly we are seeing an attempt to create a "Dean Scream", a moment that can be edited for television to convince people who aren't paying attention that Lamont and his supporters are unbalanced - while allowing much worse behavior from the approved insider candidate as "just politics". This kind of abysmally unbalanced reporting is typical for people like John Dickerson, who routinely skew and slant their coverage, but it only really worked when, and to the exent, that Americans wanted thugs in charge of their government. Right now the very obvious thuggishness of Bush and his entourage is becoming a liability in the eyes of most Americans. Even as the group thinkers are falling back from "We can win the war in Iraqetnam!" to "We can't afford to lose the war in Iraqetnam!", Americans want to wash their hands of the whole business. Even the short bounce for violence that came with Israel's bombing campaign is now receding, as Isreal's response begins to look indistinguishable from Hezbollah's terrorism. They have built a wasteland and cannot even call it peace.

More after the jump.

Lieberman's screaming minions - who are attacking people on the campaign dime - represent the ultimate end point of the war hysteria that the country has travelled through. In a sense what Americans attempted was a Mao-style Cultural Revolution, where screaming and flag waving gave one permission to behave in anti-social and thugish ways. The difference is that Mao had enough hysterical supporters to actually annihilate the intellectual classes of China, whereas Bush and Lieberman could only muster up a few rent-a-rioters. It is in Iraq where we see the ultimate end point of the theocratic-plutocratic dogma which fueled Bush and his rise to power. It is in Iraq where we see the same kind of outright economic, political and cultural devastation that marked Mao's last years in power in China - declining output, disruption of basic services, and endless rounds of violence and reprisal. It would be 15 years before China recovered from Cultural Revolution, it will be as long before Iraq does.

The public has rejeced Bushism, the top down media is still filled with people like James Fallows who feel a compulsion to knee pad the Bush executive before being even mildly critical. Iraq is going to end Lieberman's political career, because the gross failure of Iraq as a policy, and the costs that it has put on the American people in prosperity and blood, are beyond endurance. It is also going to end the media careers of those who backed it.

Hamher's error is in choosing a symbol for a white politician pretending to be a friend to the African-American community which works in the reverse manner. Blackface is offensive because it is associated with Nazi "degenerate" cartoons, and it is a form of overt bigotry and racism which was quasi-innocently participated in by people who are still alive and well. It wasn't really until the early 1960's that "cakewalking" and blackface became unacceptable as homecoming dance activities. People are never so outraged about symbols that they are ashamed of. If a progressive wants an image for politicians that use black votes to enact policies that hurt those very voters, they need go no farther than Jim Crow, which was put into place by politicians who actively courted the very people that they then disenfranchised. Saying that Lieberman has suddenly discovered the black vote, which he has never courted before, and that there is something suspiciously shallow about his attempt to become the reverse Oreo candidate, is a legitimate political point. But we can do without the corking, it creates a fog of associations to American Apartheid which do not advance the point being made. This isn't the first time this particular symbol has tripped up a blogger, and the lesson should have been learned the first time.

But if racial images and humor which touches on bigotry is a sensitive topic, consider that it is only this week that we got "french fries" back on Capitol Hill menus. If Hamsher is to be attacked for poor handling of race - then what are we to say about ethnic hatred stirred up by act of Congress? Where is the outrage from our beloved top down media on this point? Or on the not very well disguised racism implicit in the anti-immigration movement? Or in the anti-arab racism implicit in much of the traffic at places like Little Green Footballs? If a picture is worth a flap, then the crypto-racism used to fuel our drive into Iraq should be worth a scandal. And yet, there has been no trogburst of media over the issue. Strange, balance is supposedly the rubric under which far right wing talking points are screamed out on talk shows against reasonable policy explanations from centrist and left leaning wonks. Balance that seems to be conveniently forgotten when protecting the scandal of Iraq is in play. Where was the balancing account of Lieberman's campaign in the coverage today? I found not a trace of it.

Krugman has labelled false balance the "shape of earth, opinions differ" problem. But what about the other direction, where slanted coverage tosses out even this fig leaf in order to create a false impression?

Thus while Jane Hamsher's blunder in choice of images can't really be defended, it pales in comparison to the trail of blood on the hands of editors at the major east coast daily newspapers, who stood by idly while Republican leadership told racist jokes about the French, and used crypto racist images in relation to our enemies in the war on terror. If Joe Lieberman had to send away every supporter who had said "towel head" - or who offensively equated Iraq to the war on terror, as they did at a recent attempt to physically assault Lamont supporters - then he would have no supporters left at all.