Lanny Davis has discovered that the left does not have a monopoly on virtue.

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.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing--in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against “communists and their fellow travelers.” The word “McCarthyism” became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right’s fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a “communist” or “socialist” who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.

I came to believe that we liberals couldn’t possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years--with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage--I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Shocking.

Don’t get me wrong: he has every reason to be appalled by the behavior of the anti-Joe left, but he couches the first part of his article in a kind of sanctimony that rankles. There have always been hateful, mean-spirited people on both sides of the debate. No political party owns righteousness, and no party ever will. It kind of gets down to my driving-in-traffic view of the world: I’m just as likely to be cut off on the highway by an arrogant, SUV-driving NRA member as I am by a latte-sipping, Volvo-driving PETA member. Once you accept that parties are made up of people who aren’t just you with different faces, you have to realize that your party probably contains a jerk or two--that political similarities don’t automatically bestow goodness on individuals.

So, yeah, it seems a little late in life to learn that lesson, but here’s to Lanny and down with the Joe-haters. Watching the netroots mobilize against Lieberman has been quite a spectacle, and watching them rip into their own has been mind boggling. The netroots are a vicious little group of people.

And, for the record, I am looking forward to reading his book, Scandal: How ‘Gotcha’ Politics Is Destroying America. I yelled a little about “gotcha” moments quite a while back and I’m looking forward to reading what he has to say on the subject.