Right-winger Joe Lieberman finds his natural resting place at AEI
by David Atkins
Every Democrat who ever supported this jerk beyond his role as Al Gore’s campaign footstool needs to be roundly mocked today.
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman is joining the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, the organization announced Monday.
Lieberman — Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000 and a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 — will co-chair AEI’s American Internationalism Project, an effort to rebuild a bipartisan consensus about big foreign policy questions.
This is a common project of the Right these days. They know that no one likes their ideas. Scarred by the experience in Iraq, few want to do it again in Iran. Few want to eliminate Social Security, give tax breaks to rich, loosen gun laws, or do any of the other things on the Right’s agenda.
So one of the Right’s strategies is to go trolling for morally deficient, easily corrupted neoliberal “Democrats” to assist their efforts at creating a “bipartisan consensus” to override popular will and common sense in the service of the conservative agenda.
Fifty years ago, Joe Lieberman would have been seen for exactly what he is: a hardline rightwing conservative. That any decent Democrat would have supported him would have been considered laughable. But then, we’re not the same country we were fifty years ago. We’re still battling the deep, horrific wounds caused by the Southern Strategy and the Powell Memo.
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