Sour Thoughts for Dog Days

Let's start with Cynthia McKinney. Don't you think that if Arab-American or African-American groups targeted an incumbent white, liberal, maybe Jewish, congressperson, and shipped in money by the truckload to oust the incumbent, the rafters would shake with bellows of outrage?

Yet when a torrent of money from out-of-state Jewish organizations smashed Earl Hilliard, the first elected black Representative in Alabama since Reconstruction, you could have heard a mouse cough. Hilliard had made the fatal error of calling for some measure of evenhandedness in the Middle East. So he was targeted by AIPAC and the others. Down he went, defeated in the Democratic primary by Artur Davis, a black lawyer who obediently sang for his supper on the topic of Israel.

At that particular moment the liberal watchdogs were barking furiously in an entirely different direction. Ed McGaa, a Green candidate, has had the effrontery to run in Minnesota for Paul Wellstone's Senate seat. Such an uproar! Howls of fury from Marc Cooper and Harold Meyerson lashing McGaa for his presumption. Even a pompous open letter from Steve Cobble hassling the Minnesota Greens for endangering St. Paul. Any of these guys think of writing to Artur Davis, telling him to back off, or to denounce him as a cat's-paw of groups backing Sharon's terror against Palestinians? You bet they did.

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