This Is What Jane Hamsher Does

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake has issued one of those non-apology apologies after posting, at Huffingtonpost, a now infamous photoshopping of Joe Lieberman in blackface. It's since been taken down. Tom Maguire has a great post up in which Lieberman challenger Ned Lamont claims a sudden and implausible lack of knowledge about Hamsher. Michelle Malkin covers a lot of territory on this one, including one of Hamsher's past hits on author Kate O'Beirne.

To develop Malkin's thought a bit--what strikes me is how it took a blackface image to derail the Hamsher Express. When she attacked a book by O'Beirne by saying The bitch is dead meat, it didn't derail Hamsher. When Hamsher coined the term Rape Gurney Joe because Lieberman said Catholic hospitals shouldn't be forced to provide services that would violate Church teaching, mainly it boosted her traffic. Describe Washington Post reporters as the willing bitches of Bush Co., no problem.

That's just how Hamsher expresses herself, and until now she hasn't paid for it. To the contrary. Prominent bloggers including Jay Rosen of PressThink have cited her favorably. Back in January, as expertly documented by Jay, Washingtonpost.com invited Hamsher to a live-chat panel including himself, Glenn Reynolds, post.com's Jim Brady and Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis after a controversy about the Post shutting down comments related to a Deborah Howell column. Brady closed comments because of horrible personal abuse and profanity. Hamsher was outraged, naturally. Today she can be outraged at herself, but probably won't be, for shutting down comments on her apology post.

In any case I'm glad to see Hamsher finally discovered some kind of slur that was too extreme. But Hamsher and Firedoglake have always vandalized the public this way. Any decent person recoils from ugly images that recall anti-black race hatred. But liberals own the civil rights franchise--just ask them--and this is what it took to get everyone's attention.

UPDATE: In Dan Balz's Lieberman assails Lamont Over Supporter's Blog Post on A9, more details on how unlikely it would be for Lamont to be quite so clueless about "the blogs":

Lieberman angrily demanded that Lamont denounce the action and sever all ties with Jane Hamsher, the founder of the Web log Firedoglake, who posted the photo on another blog, HuffingtonPost.com. She travels with the campaign along with other bloggers. She is not on the campaign staff but has actively promoted Lamont's candidacy and helped raise money for him through her blog.

Yep, at least $30,000 according to this July 4th story by Paul Bass at the New Haven Independent.

And Huffpost founder Arianna Huffington didn't see anything wrong with the image. Balz:

Arianna Huffington, the founder of HuffingtonPost.com, said that no one from the Web site has asked for the photo to be removed. "We did not ask her, nor would we have asked her," she said. "It was a satirical point she made in the picture, and there was nothing in the text that was racist, and there is nothing about Jane that is racist."

(Hamsher pulled it down at the request of panic-stricken interns Lamon'ts blog coordinator.