"I want the keyboard!" "You can't handle the keyboard!"

The great thing about the Internet, with emails, instant messaging, and blogs, is that we can communicate instantly, even, in the latter case, putting our ideas before the whole world in a flash.

The bad thing about the Internet, with emails, instant messaging, and blogs, is that we can communicate instantly, even, in the latter case, putting our ideas before the whole world in a flash.

Yesterday, during a discussion on NPR's Talk of the Nation, a psychotherapist who has studied youth culture, said that usually, in their Internet-based communications, 'tweenagers are likely to be far more brazen in their sexual talk than they are in their interpersonal communications at school.

A similar phenomenon seems to happen among adults who email, IM, or blog. Their unaccustomed brazenness isn't necessarily sexual, although there's plenty of anecdotal evidence of that. But the brazenness many adults practice under cover of their PCs relates to politics. A whole army of net-users seems to feel no hesitation about saying the most outrageous, nasty things imaginable about pols with whom they disagree, things they would never think of saying--or would at least think twice about saying--in personal conversation.

Lanny Davis, Democratic operative, one-time aide to Bill Clinton, has a piece lamenting the role being played by Dem bloggers and emailers in the contest between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont in the Democratic US Senate primary in Connecticut. He writes, in part:

My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman...

The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

• "Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby" (by "rim," posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).

• "Joe's on the Senate floor now and he's growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate" (by "ctkeith," posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).

• On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

• "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).

• "Joe Lieberman is a racist and a religious bigot" (by "greenskeeper," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

And these are some of the nicer examples.

One Sunday morning on C-Span I debated Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel on the Lieberman versus Lamont race. Afterwards I received a series of emails--many of them in ALL CAPS (which often suggests the hyper-frenetic state of these extremist haters)--that were of the same stripe as the blog posts, and filled with the same level of personal hate.

But the issue is not just emotional outbursts by these usually anonymous bloggers. A friend of mine just returned from Connecticut, where he had spoken on several occasions on behalf of Joe Lieberman. He happens to be a liberal antiwar Democrat, just as I am. He is also a lawyer. He told me that within a day of a Lamont event--where he asked the candidate some critical questions--some of his clients were blitzed with emails attacking him and threatening boycotts of their products if they did not drop him as their attorney. He has actually decided not to return to Connecticut for the primary today; he is fearful for his physical safety...

It seems that at their keyboards, drunk on the power of instantaneous communications, people of both the Right and Left have forgotten that the functioning of democracy depends on civility and mutual respect. One reason that Joe Lieberman was gaining in the polls as his primary campaign drew to a close, I'm sure, is the revulsion that many Democrats in the state felt over the nastiness, not of the campaign waged by Ned Lamont, but by the things written by his cyber-supporters about Lieberman.

Whether Lieberman was able to close the gap and can beat Lamont today remains to be seen. But I'm not making a political statement when I say that I'm sort of pulling for him. I hate to see the nastiness of this small army of mean-spirited cyber-pundits get rewarded.

[Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for leading me to Davis' piece.]