Pot calls kettle noir

With the Connecticut Senate primary on Tuesday, New Republic co-owner (not owner) Marty Peretz unleashes one last broadside in favour of the now underdog, Joe Lieberman. One quirk: it's in the Wall Street Journal and not the home publication. Anyway, his opening accusation: that the front runner, Ned Lamont, is from the elite:

It's really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of "having arrived" up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.

Now when Marty Peretz accuses other people of being from the elite, we already know what to expect, but if we'd forgotten, here's some of the phrasing from the rest of the tirade:

seeking office de haut en bas ... someone, with no public record to speak of but with perhaps a quarter of a billion dollars to his name, who wants to be a senator. Mr. Lamont has almost no experience in public life. He was a cable television entrepreneur, a run-of-the-mill contemporary commercant with unusually easy access to capital ... I was there, a partisan, as a graduate student at the beginning, in 1962, when the eminent Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes (grandson of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes) ran for the U.S. Senate as an independent against George Cabot Lodge and the victor, Ted Kennedy, a trio of what in the Ivies is, somewhat derisively, called "legacies" ... Would Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be more agreeable if he thought that we had disposed of the military option in favor of more country club behavior?

Peretz also makes repeated insinuations linking opposition to the war in Iraq with Communism, but since the campaign he supports already has a sense of a doom about it, they're not worth dwelling on.

UPDATE 11 AUGUST: The man who writes a column called Cambridge Diarist adds another critique of Lamont --

This episode shows that Islamofascism is a real threat to civilized life and that it must be fought severely and wholeheartedly. I don't know if Ned Lamont has thought seriously about this. It seems so remote from life in Greenwich. But, if he plays true to form, he might suggest taking the whole issue before the United Nations. That would be a gracious setting. After all, Lamont can no longer avail himself of the country club he quit on the eve of his primary campaign.