PRESSWATCH: Boomer Terror

...Lamont, signaling the difficulties he may have attracting Connecticut's moderate voters in a general election...

...The week after the primary, Confessore and Patrick Healy wrote: "As the newly proclaimed Democratic nominee, Mr...

...Call them Pinch Sulzberger Democrats, after the Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who described his worldview in a revealing commencement address in May at the State University of New York's New Paltz campus: When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon...

...The next day, the Times reported that the Post was right and the Times was wrong...

...To talk about airport security and how to make it better...

...PRESSWATCH James Taranto Boomer Terror N AUGUST JUDGE ANNA DIGGS TAYLOR held t h a t Americans have a constitutional right to communicate with enemy agents during wartime and ordered the Bush administration to end its terrorist surveillance program...

...They will never be able to go back to a "pre-9/ll mind-set...

...James Taranto is editor of Opinion Journal.corn, the website of the Wall Street Journal~ editorial page...

...Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge's conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision's reasoning and rhetoric yesterday," began the story by reporter Adam Liptak...

...Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates...

...Bai wrote that Lamont owed his victory less to the "young, online activists" who took most of the credit than to "exasperated and ideologically disappointed baby boomers": These are the liberals who quietly seethed as Bill Clinton worked with Republicans to reform welfare and pass free-trade agreements...

...We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors...

...Itwasn't supposed to be this way...

...Our children, we vowed, would never know that...

...A term like "moderate" is something of a political inkblot, and the Times's characterizing Lamont this waytells us more about the Times-which enthusiastically endorsed Lamont over Lieberman-than it does about Lamont...

...A few days after the election, Times reporters Nicholas Confessore and Avi Salzman interviewed "nearly three dozen Lieberman supporters" and found that most planned to stand by their man, who was running as an independent in November...

...Most observers regarded Lieberman as the moderate and Lamont as the liberal-and so did the Times's 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 news pages...

...One of the most insightful descriptions of Lamont supporters' mentality also came from the Times-this time from an article by Matt Bai that appeared in the paper's Sunday magazine...

...Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place...

...As to how to confront the dangers of today, the paper offers nothing but banalities: Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain...

...OK, that's not quite true...

...Iraq has energized these older lapsed liberals...

...But the Times remains in a pre-1974 mindset, ever vigilant for Vietnam-style quagmires and Watergate-like abuses of power...

...They are completely aware of the way international terrorism can come crashing down on an ordinary family, leaving the survivors stunned and bereft...

...So, well, sorry...

...The country's two most prominent liberal editorial pages disagreed sharply on the merits of her ruling...

...Furthermore, at a time when America faces a vicious enemy, a politics based on dreams of a perfect world-and on reproaching one's own country for its real or imagined imperfect i o n s - i s a dangerous form of escapism...

...But it was the yearning for a more confrontational brand of opposition on all fronts, for something resembling the black-andwhite moral choices of the 1960's, that more broadly animated Lamont's insurgency...

...Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace-but maybe there were larger forces at play...

...The subject of that editorial was the latest discovery in astrophysics, but it's a nice encapsulation of the worldview of liberal baby boomers trying to make sense of an age of terror...

...We want to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning...

...They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government's major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions...

...Lamont is moving to adopt a general election strategy that attracts more moderate voters, who are crucial to victory in Connecticut elections...

...A MERICA'S MISADVENTURE in Vietnam and the abuse of power in Watergate were tragedies for the country, but to liberal baby boomers, the outcomes--America's defeat, a president's downfall-were moral triumphs...

...Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, the Times editorialized that "the rebellion against Mr...

...But while youthful idealism and impatience are well and good, there is something sad about a man in his mid-50s reproaching the world for not being free of war and corruption...

...This is a mysterious universe," the Times opined in yet another August editorial, "and the more we know about it the more mysterious it seems...

...To find out what worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts farther...

...Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal...

...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49...

...The day after Ned Lamont beat Sen...

...for a generation that got into politics marching against Vietnam, an antiwar movement is comfortable space...

...This point was never clearer than two days after Lamont's victory over Lieberman, when the British announced that they had thwarted a terror plot that might have involved even more murders than 9/11...

...To those who generally support the administration's approach to terrorism, it was a reminder that feckless policies-such as the fetishization of civil liberties at the expense of intelligence-gathering abilities, or cutting and running from a difficult batt l e - h a v e potentially dire consequences...

...A dozen of their neighbors died at the World Trade Center...

...The Times went on the defensive: Within the Democratic ranks, the vice president added, "there's a significant body of opinion that wants to go back-I guess the way I would describe it is sort of the pre-9/ll mind-set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in...

...If triangulation wasn't a winning strategy, they asked, why were they ever JAMES TARANTO i asked to tolerate it in the first place...

...Lieberman, Ned Lamont, lives in Greenwich, a suburb full of commuters who work in NewYork high-rise buildings...

...We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government...

...After the "stolen" election of 2000 and the subsequent loss of House and Senate seats in 2004, these Democrats felt duped...

...The Washington Post described it as "neither careful nor scholarly, and.., hard-hitting only in the sense that a bludgeon is hard-hitting...

...The Web gave them a place to share their frustrations, and Howard Dean gave them an icon...

...But the New York Times praised Taylor's "careful, thoroughly grounded opinion" that "reasserted the rule of law over a lawless administration...

...Sulzberger's "apology" for having failed "not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors" is less an honest statement of regret than a show of moral v a n i t y - a n indictment of the world for failing to live up to Sulzberger's high standards...

...Only a handful of those Lieberman supporters interviewed said they would switch to Mr...

...The man who beat Mr...

...This wasn't the first time this summer that the Times editorial page seemed to be living in an alternate universe...