Bloggers dog Dems who vote Bush

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Mark Pera has a standard attack line against his incumbent congressional opponent, one he loves enough to repeat four times in a 10-minute interview.

"Every time Bush needs a vote," the Democrat from Western Springs, Ill., says, "he turns to Dan Lipinski and gets it."

Independent ratings show Lipinski, a second-term Democrat representing the Southwest Side and southwest suburbs, actually voted with the Republican president less than 20 percent of the time this year (down from about half the time in 2006). But he has backed President Bush in at least one key vote on the Iraq war -- and he has suggested war opponents are better-served by working across party lines than by sending withdrawal timelines for repeated presidential vetoes.

That, in the new Democratic Congress, is enough to draw Lipinski an Internet-fueled primary challenge from the left.

Frustrated with Democrats' failure to thwart Bush on Iraq and other issues after winning House and Senate control in 2006, Internet activists deride Lipinski and about 40 other Democratic members of Congress as "Bush Dogs" for their votes on the war and warrantless wiretapping. The activists have targeted those lawmakers with attack ads, scathing blog posts and, in Lipinski's case, financial help for his primary foe. Pera, a Cook County assistant state's attorney, outraised Lipinski last quarter, a rarity for a challenger, thanks in part to the $30,000 he raised online over a recent two-week period.

I guess the Cook County Democratic Machine isn't popular with everyone in the Democratic Party.