Hell Hath No Fury Like a City Scorned

I think Ned Lamont is going to lament his campaign manager's decision to diss working-class Waterbury, CT (from Political Diary):

Ned Lamont's campaign has selected the wrong Connecticut city to pick a fight with. Last week, Tom Swan, Mr. Lamont's campaign manager, lashed out at working-class Waterbury, the state's fifth-largest city, after hearing it had overwhelmingly backed Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Mr. Swan described Waterbury, a place that has seen several of its politicians go to jail, as a city "where the forces of slime meet the forces of evil."

Mr. Lamont has apologized for the remark, but not soon enough to prevent a slashing editorial entitled "Ned Lamont's True Colors" in the Waterbury Republican-American last Sunday. The newspaper unloaded rhetoric seldom seen these days. The editorial began: "Liberal journalists adore [Mr. Lamont] because they share his world view on abortion, homosexual marriage, universal health care, racial quotas, loopy environmentalism and especially the war against Islamic terrorism. They are blood brothers, or more accurately, fellow travelers... If you shake Mr. Lamont's family tree, a lot of Red apples will fall."

The paper goes on to claim that Mr. Lamont's great-grandfather, Thomas W. Lamont, was a "wealthy progressive pacifist... the sugar daddy for the American Communist Party and other extreme left-wing organizations." His son, Corliss Lamont, in turn was "an unapologetic Stalinist and atheist. Congress once declared him 'probably the most persistent propagandist for the Soviet Union to be found anywhere in the United States.'" The paper claimed that Corliss's nephew, Mr. Lamont's father, also "embraced liberal-socialism and passed his religious devotion to atheistic materialism along to his son."

Mr. Lamont declined to comment on the paper's charges. His campaign notes that his father, Ted, was a Republican economist who served in the Nixon administration. That said, the Waterbury paper's discussion of Corliss Lamont should serve as a cautionary reminder of how gently history has treated real Communist fellow travelers. A founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Corliss Lamont was indeed a notorious apologist for Stalin. The New York Times reported in 1938: "Corliss Lamont, chairman of the American Friends of the Soviet Union, charged yesterday that the [John] Dewey commission, which recently requested postponement of the current [purge] trial in Moscow, had 'abandoned even the pretense of impartiality.'" Indeed, long after Stalin's crimes had been condemned by his old Politburo comrades, Sidney Hook, a noted liberal scholar, wrote Lamont in 1966 to upbraid him for "your thunderous silence as our charges against Stalin were being confirmed."

I haven't seen that much anti-Communist language in print since reading old articles from the 50's. It may not make much difference in the race, but it is entertaining.