Sorry It Bothers You

by digby

… but tough shit.

From Jonathan Chait today:

But if Lieberman’s allies are irritating and often wrongheaded, alas, his enemies are worse. Lieberman recently declared, “I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party.” Markos Moulitsas, the lefty blogger from Daily Kos who has appeared in a Lamont commercial and has made Lieberman’s defeat a personal crusade, posted this quote on his website in the obvious belief that it’s self-evidently absurd. But shouldn’t we all have greater loyalties than the one to our party — say, to our country? Partisanship isn’t nothing, but must it be everything?

No, but it must be something when you are facing a Republican party that is systematically destroying everything the Democratic party believes in. I don’t know why this is so hard for DC insiders to understand. Joe Lieberman actively undermines the Democratic Party, to its detriment and for his own purposes. He could support the Iraq war, for instance, without lecturing those of us who are opposed to it from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal for gawd’s sake! Are the optics of that not crystal clear?

It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years.We undermine the President’s credibility at our nation’s peril.

Who’s being attacked, there? Are we supposed to just shut up and take that patented Rove spin sitting down? That op-ed went far beyond betraying party loyalty to the point at which I would say he is betraying loyalty to this country. Trying to quell dissent is not only undemocratic, it is unAmerican.

And Lieberman has taken that unacceptable position over and over again during the last decade or so, making a fetish out his “independence” which has manifested itself as GOP useful idiot time and again. He often “triangulates” against rank and file Democrats, making common cause with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. He uses liberals as his favorite foils happily helping the Republicans to demonize half of his party.

It’s not about voting records or score cards. It’s about a man who lied in the recent debate about his position on social security, of all things, and portrayed himself as having not been one of the last holdouts against the Democratic plan to preserve it as is. Here’s Josh Marshall on that subject:

Last year, when I devoted most of this blog for several months to the Social Security story, Lieberman was one of most frustrating and inexplicable hold outs. I’m much more willing than others to let Democrats in marginal states and districts take positions suited to their constituencies rather than those embraced by Democrats nationally. To me that just makes sense on every level. The premise of my thinking on Social Security, however, was that there was just no political downside to supporting Social Security no matter how red a state you were from. Abortion rights or gay rights may stand principle against expediency or even political survival. But Social Security was just a gimme, a no-brainer.

Still, when we were going after some of these folks I could see that some of the resistance out of the Fainthearted Faction was based on ingrained habits of political survival and real disinclination to defy a Republican president who still seemed very popular and politically powerful.

But what was Lieberman’s excuse?

We went back and forth with him. I’d talk to his staffers and folks around him and work and work and work to get a straight answer, but just had the hardest time. It was always this statement or that that seemed to support Social Security but really left the door open to some compromise on phase out when you looked at it closely. On and on and on.

And what was the point of that? Certainly it wasn’t political, at least not in the narrow sense. Lieberman didn’t have anything to worry about in Connecticut. If it was ideological, what’s that about? It’s a core Democratic issue. Not a shibboleth or a sacred cow. But a core reason why most Democrats are Democrats.

In the end it just seemed like a desire to be in the mix for some illusory compromise or grand bargain, an ingrained disinclination to take a stand, even in a case when it really mattered. There’s some whiff of indifference to the great challenges of the age, even amidst the atmospherics of concern.

Do you get it Chait? This isn’t an era of bipartisan consensus and when Lieberman reflexively plays this game for what are obviously self-serving reasons, he sells out the party. And I would say, he sells out America. The stakes, as Chait himself writes in this very article are that high:

Even though all but the loopiest Democrat would concede that Bin Laden is more evil than Bush, that doesn’t mean he’s a greater threat. Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains, has no weapons of mass destruction and apparently very limited numbers of followers capable of striking at the U.S.

Bush, on the other hand, has wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country. He has massively mismanaged a major war, with catastrophic consequences; he has strained the fabric of American democracy with his claims of nearly unchecked power and morally corrupt Gilded Age policies. It’s quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more — if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.

And so what should we do? The electoral college and the senate require that we make room in the Democratic coalition for a fair number of conservative Senators from conservative states and field Democratic presidential candidates who can appeal to at least some voters from those areas as well. We accept that. Chait, however, sees that as a negligible consideration:

Moulitsas and many of his allies insist that they just want Democrats to win. But in fact, they believe that any deviation from the party line — except for a few circumscribed instances, such as Democrats running for office in red states — is an unforgivable crime. They have consigned large chunks of the center-left to enemy status. It is an odd way to go about building a majority.

It’s the only way to go about building a majority that isn’t a carbon copy of the other party. Liberals have been turned into pariahs not just in the country, but among certain center-left (I would argue center-right) politicians who have allowed the party to be unnecessarily dragged to the right out of a failed experiment in third-way politics while the Republicans were playing brute partisan politics. The proof is in the pudding. We are in the minority and have been for quite some time now. And this polarized 50/50 nation always seems to just tilt enough to the right that we get screwed. “Centrists” like Lieberman are the dupes who make that possible.

The rank and file accept that the Democratic coalition is going to have to include conservatives from red states and nobody is arguing that they are not allowed to have latitude in their voting patterns and even in their rhetoric. They represent conservative people. That’s democracy at work. But I don’t see Mary Landrieu or Blanche Lincoln or Ben Nelson writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal telling dissenters that we are undermining national security by criticizing the war. Even they don’t do that, and they could probably benefit sometimes from triangulating against the liberals. (And we’d grit our teeth and bear it, out of pragmatism.)

But why the fuck should we buckle under to a nationally known Blue State Democrat who votes for conservative right wing judges, supports the war, lectures about morals, compromises on basic human decency for rape victims and uses liberals as his favorite whipping boys and girls? Is it so surprising that the liberals of Connecticut have finally reached their limits?

The real joke in all this is the fact that I don’t think anybody really thought that Lamont had a chance in the beginning and were just hoping to put some pressure on Lieberman to stop kissing Bush on the lips. They were trying to shame him into distancing himself from this crap:

As some of you know, when I first ran for Vice President five years ago, my Democratic opponent was a fine U.S. senator named Joe Lieberman. We disagreed on some issues, but we stand together on this war. After visiting our troops in Iraq last month, Senator Lieberman said, quote, “almost all of the progress in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will be lost if those forces are withdrawn faster than the Iraqi military is capable of securing the country.” He is entirely correct.

It would have taken very little for him to adjust his rhetoric and acknowledge that he’s been too strident in his support for Bush. The polls suggested that anyone with a brain would have done that. Instead, he has been testy and superior, behaving as if he were entitled to the seat — even saying in the debate this week that his old mentor would have counselled Lamont not to run for the good of the party. This from the man who says he doesn’t care what the party decides in the its primary.

This sense of entrenched priviledge and lack of responsiveness to the people is what’s causing problems for the political establishment. It’s not about issues, although the war, being the most important issue to the American people and unpopular by large margin, is logically of great importance. (People are dying, after all.)

Citizens have a right to be heard and if they are not heard, they have a right to try to replace their representatives with someone who hears them. It’s called democracy. The fact that it is seen as a Stalinist purge says more about those who criticize it than those who are doing it.

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