It is a standard threat in movies about the Mob and TV dramas about thugs: “Do what I tell you, or your family’s dead.” The tactic of going after loved ones as a particularly awful form of revenge is a calling card of the truly despicable. That is why the Valerie Plame scandal so damaged the Bush Administration’s popularity, even though it was never clear (and still isn’t) that anyone there really did try to “out” Plame’s CIA status to get even with her obnoxious husband’s fueling opposition to the Iraq invasion. Just the plausible suggestion that Vice President Cheney’s gang may have committed such an ethical outrage was too much to bear.

You would think, then, that those who most revile Cheney’s no-holds-barred approach to political combat would be the least likely to emulate him. You would be wrong. We have, for example, the disgusting spectacle of a progressive activist, Hollywood producer Jane Hamsher, unambiguously trying to harm Hadassah Lieberman because her husband, Sen. Joe Lieberman, isn’t toeing the Democratic line on health care.

On her blog, Hamsher is insisting that Mrs. Lieberman should be fired from her position as global ambassador for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer charity. She cites a laundry list of supposed justifications for this demand, ranging from the false to the irrelevant to the illogical. Though Hamsher says Lieberman was once a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, Lieberman was not; she was a public relations consultant. Even if Lieberman had been a lobbyist, Hamsher’s assumption that once an industry pays you to advance its interests, you remain its passionate advocate after the job ends is an ignorant fantasy. On this I speak from the personal experience of one who worked diligently for the both U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the trial lawyers association, organizations that oppose each other on just about everything. If Hamsher was right, I would be in a padded cell.

Mrs. Lieberman’s position with the charity isn’t even a paid one, though she also has a modest consulting contract. Nonetheless, Hamsher has been urging her Hollywood pals who work with the non-profit to help Hamsher oust her. The sudden objection to Hadassah Lieberman, who been in  her role as the organization’s global ambassador for some time, was sparked not by anything she did, but by the actions of her husband the U.S. Senator. It is based solely on spite and revenge. No one can reasonably believe that Lieberman’s wife is to blame for her husband’s opposition to the health care bill. Harming her is just a convenient way to get at Joe Lieberman, just like when the goons on “The Sopranos” intimidate witnesses by sending them photos of their children at school.”Do what we say, Joe: we know where you live.”

Hamsher exemplifies what happens when fanatic political ideology kills a person’s ethics alarms. Hamsher has lost all sense of fairness, decency, and respect for the democratic process, as well as any  empathy for other human beings who don’t happen to share her convictions. When she doesn’t get the results she wants, her response is to  lash out and cause pain, even if it means attacking her true target’s family.  She can justify intimidation, dishonesty, coercion and gratuitous meanness against a stranger,  for no other reason than  that the stranger’s  husband has taken a political position she opposes.

Worst of all, Hamsher thinks she such vicious conduct is virtuous, though she would surely condemn it if it were directed at her friends and allies. When an ethics alarm breaks down this completely, the result isn’t  only the loss of ethical sensitivity. It is ethical derangement.