E.J. Dionne ends an otherwise good column with this:
If Lieberman survives this primary, it will be thanks to voters who would gladly have cast a protest ballot against him but never really wanted him to lose. Such voters — and, yes, I identify with them — are frustrated with Lieberman’s accommodationism but like and respect him and hope he might learn something from Lamont’s challenge.
A Lieberman loss next week could also create distracting problems for Democrats. Lieberman has said he would run as an independent if he lost the primary. This would divert national attention from the Democrats’ central goal of making this fall’s elections a referendum on Bush and the Republican Congress.
I suppose it might, but that no reason to succumb to Joe’s blackmail. “Vote for me or I’ll take the party down with me” hardly seems like an honest way to win an election.
Dionne says he personally knows and likes Lieberman. Perhaps he and all the other DC insiders who are so worried that this Lamont challenge will end up hurting Democrats in the fall should have a talk with Joe. After all, whether or not there is a “distraction” is entirely in his hands.
It’s possible that people felt at the beginning that they wanted to push Lieberman back from the brink (or at least get him to shut his piehole about how swimmingly the war is going) but instead of listening he got defensive and angry and attacked his own party. Contrary to what Dionne says, I think most people who are going to vote for Lamont in the primary have now seen a side of Lieberman that is not so freindly and congenial — and they are quite happy to have him lose for real. He has acted like a bit of an ass, after all.
Didja know that Rush calls Hezbollah “Hezbos”? He does. And he’s teaching his dittohead followers all kinds of good stuff about what’s going on in the Middle east and what we should do about it:
We’ve got the Hezbos, who have in interesting fashion, and I think the same thing is being attempted in Iraq, and it poses the same kind of trouble, or the same kind of challenge. The Hezbos have pretty much made — and we’ve heard the puff piece stories. Oh, they’re wonderful humanitarians, the Hezbos, why, the social services they provide the general population, why, they’re doing such wonderful things, they care about people, they passed out health care and whatever the hell it is. Well, what they’re doing is making the general population of these countries dependent on them, and as such, that is how they secure — it’s either through blackmail or genuine support, but it’s how they get the support of the general population centers. You also have the Israeli factor in that. These are Arabs absolutely, so there are a number of factors in it.
But the one thing that has really changed in warfare, from World War II forward — and I know that tactics change, but strategy doesn’t. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is still something that’s regarded as timely, even though it’s thousands of years old. The one thing that you just don’t do these days is kill civilians. It used to be the name of the game in war. And it was done on purpose. Now, it was done to end wars, and it was done to achieve decisive victory, and it was done to save the lives of your own troops in the field. All of those things were factors.
So we had this episode at Qana. You know who really killed those people are the Hezbos. Hezbollah killed those people. Hezbollah put those people in that building and brought the rocket launchers in close by, knowing full well that the launcher would be targeted. That building didn’t fall for eight hours after it was hit. What do you bet that the Hezbos finished the job that the Israeli bomb did not actually complete? What do you bet they killed their own people for the PR aspect? These people cannot compete militarily with any industrialized nation, so they have to fight the PR and the spin war. And it is amazing to me to see how easily the duped US and world media is.
[…]
Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it. Yet they send these pictures out without saying all of this is being staged for us. They send these pictures out as though they are in a timeline of an exact sequence, which they are not, which you will see when you read it. So the point is, Israel is probably not even killing all these civilians. I asked the other day, when you have the Hezbos who don’t wear uniforms, how do you know what civilian deaths are versus Hezbo deaths, how do you know who’s who there? You don’t.
Man. Denial is a river in Egypt, but apparently it runs right through Rush’s addled brain. Are people buying this?
He continues:
Until civilians — frankly, I’m not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men, but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it’s not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that. It’s not their fault, Rush, it’s not their fault! No. Not saying that it is.
But as long as you’re going to allow these people to hide behind baby carriages and women and children and mosques and so-called apartment buildings, and if you’re going to launch military strikes at military targets, which Hezbollah is not doing — 120 rockets into Israel yesterday. Nobody has a care in the world, nobody has one word of condemnation for that. We don’t know what targets were hit, we don’t know how many people died. The Israelis are not parading their victims around on TV for propaganda purposes. As long as we are going to pussyfoot and patty-cake around, we’re not going to get anywhere, we’re not going to make any real progress.
We may delay the inevitable, we may get ceasefire after ceasefire after ceasefire, but we’re not going to deal with the root cause of the problem. And as such, your kids and grandkids are going to be saddled with that at some point when they assume responsibility for the fate and future of the country.
So, the pictures of the dead are all phony, staged propaganda but the civilians need to be killed anyway in order to get to the root causes of the problem — which I understand to be too many living arabs. If we don’t kill them now, our kids and grandkids will have to kill their kids and grandkids later.
This blatant genocidal bloodlust has become de rigeur on the right now. It’s on talk radio, TV and in the columns of respectable newspapers. They don’t even pretend to be civilized anymore. Maybe it’s just the SOS, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don’t ever remember this kind of stuff being openly bandied about like it’s normal. And those who did, like Curtis LeMay, didn’t have audiences of 25 million listeners to spew their bilge to.
But hey,what do we expect? Once you explode the taboo against torture, can genocide be far behind?
Here is an excellent article in Salon by Colin McEnroe about Lieberman, well worth sitting through to ad to read in full. I’d like to highlight just one little piece of it:
Covering Lieberman is a good way to understand how misleading a voting record can be. (Are you listening, Courant editorial board?) Most members of Congress vote with their parties the preponderance of the time. There are other questions to ask. Did he vote differently on a much-more-important earlier amendment or cloture motion? Did he wait until it was clear his vote wouldn’t hurt the other side? Are his public pronouncements strangely different from his votes?
This is a prime reason why the special interest groups are so ineffectual. They’ve gotten so lazily dependent upon their “scorcards” they can’t even feel it when they are being slowly stabbed in the back. They simply aren’t asking the right questions.
This article lays out all the gripes that Connecticut, a liberal state, has against old Joe and it’s quite an indictment. But what it comes down to is that he’s always tried to have it both ways. He rhetorically reinforces all the destructive GOP memes, hedges his bets on important votes and even though (like most politicians) he generally votes with the party he’s effetively working for the other side a good part of the time. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that being a member of the minority party in the Senate for most of his career means that he’s had a lot of free votes that don’t mean diddly.
Rhetoric, on the other hand, is one of the few powers a minority party has as it tries to persuade the country to come over to their side and put the opposition on the spot. Helping the majority make its case is one of the most destructive things Joe does. Democratic partisans have been complaining about it for years and so apparently have his constituents.
I would even go so far as to say that it is exactly this kind of jarring incongruity that has made the voters feel uncomfortable voting for Democrats generally and it’s the biggest failing of the DLC experiment which Lieberman embodies. Indeed, it’s what people say over and over again: they don’t know what the party stands for. Why would they? You have leaders like Lieberman constantly trying to have it both ways. It’s confusing and it makes people uncomfortable — and it finally made some of the voters of Connecticut uncomfortable enough that they decided to look for someone who reliably and consistently reflected their views.
Update: Here’s Lamont on tonight’s Colbert Report, from Crooks and Liars.
I couldn’t get the video at first and so only listened. I was struck, as I was during the debate, that there is something in Lamont’s delivery/cadence/accent that is reminiscent of JFK.
One of the things I think people misunderstand about the neocons is that they think it is all about Israel. This is not the case. Not only are all neocons not Jewish, their ambitions are purely American in nature and encompass far more than the middle-east.
A case in point is the family of Norman Podhoretz, one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism. I’m reminded of what a tremendous scope they have this morning by Jonathan Schwarz writing over at This Modern World:
…I don’t think many people remember … that in 2004 John Podhoretz’s mother, conservative luminary Midge Decter, frankly explained the real reason we attacked Iraq:
“We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.”
So there you have it, straight from the world’s most appealing family: we invaded Iraq for the oil, but we may have made a mistake by not killing millions when we got there.
BONUS: Decter’s daughter is married to Elliot Abrams, making him John Podhoretz’s brother-in-law. Abrams, now on the National Security Council, pleaded guilty to misleading Congress over Iran-Contra. He also tried to cover-up the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, in which 900 men, women and children were slaughtered.
Schwartz goes on to describe a typical Podhoretz family gathering:
“Has the caterer gotten here yet?”
“No. Let’s drop napalm on his town and then move house to house, shooting any survivors.”
“Sounds good! What about the band? Are they going to play standards, or more contemporary stuff?”
“I don’t know. Let’s pay a proxy army to rape and murder all the women and then go on a bloody rampage, killing thousands more.”
Yes, we laugh, but don’t kid yourself. It’s not wholly surprising that number one son, J-Pod, came up with this over the week-end:
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
That is neoconservatism in practice.
In theory, it goes waaaay beyond the middle east. Here’s my favorite piece from the PNAC’s influential paper “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” signed by half the administration including Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld:
To ensure America’s control of space in the near term, the minimum requirements are to develop a robust capability to transport systems to space, carry on operations once there, and service and recover space systems as needed. As outlined by Space Command, carrying out this program would include a mix of re- useable and expendable launch vehicles and vehicles that can operate within space, including “space tugs to deploy, reconstitute, replenish, refurbish, augment, and sustain” space systems. But, over the longer term, maintaining control of space will inevitably require the application of force both in space and from space,including but not limited to anti- missile defenses and defensive systems capable of protecting U.S. and allied satellites; space control cannot be sustained in any other fashion, with conventional land, sea, or airforce, or by electronic warfare. This eventuality is already recognized by official U.S. national space policy, which states that the “Department of Defense shall maintain a capability to execute the mission areas of space support, force enhancement, space control and force application.
… the argument to replace U.S. Space Command with U.S. Space Forces – a separate service under the Defense Department – is compelling. While it is conceivable that, as military space capabilities develop, a transitory “Space Corps” under the Department of the Air Force might make sense, it ought to be regarded as an intermediary step, analogous to the World War II-era Army Air Corps, not to the Marine Corps, which remains a part of the Navy Department. If space control is an essential element for maintaining American military preeminence in the decades to come, then it will be imperative to reorganize the Department of Defense to ensure that its institutional structure reflects new military realities.
Never let it be said they limited their vision of “benevolent American hegemony” to the middle east — or even planet earth. They always think big, very big.
Just as an aside, I think Midge Decter’s lovelorn paean to Don Rumsfeld may stand as the most unintentionally funny of all the over-the-top Bush years hagiography:
“He works standing up at a tall writing table, as if energy, or perhaps determination, might begin to leak away from too much sitting down”
This one never fails to make me laugh out loud:
Decter: What Rumsfeld’s having become an American sex symbol seems to say about American culture today is that the assault on men leveled by the women’s movement, having poisoned the normally delicate relations between men and women and thereby left a generation of younger women with a load of anxiety they are only now beginning to throw off, is happily almost over. It’s hard to overestimate the significance of the term “stud” being applied to a man who has reached the age of 70 and will not too long from now be celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.
It’s hard to overestimate it all right.
The Podhoretz’s are America’s first family of neoconservatism, dysfuntional masculinity and world domination. It’s quite an achievement.
In an interesting post by Ben Adler over at TAPPED today, I noticed this remark:
…those of us who are under-whelmed by Lamont and are more worried about potentially losing the seat to a right-winger…
I’ve heard this quite a bit. The Lamont challenge is seen as a possible threat to lose the seat. But I don’t see why that is. The state regularly elects Chris Dodd who is a liberal. It’s a state so blue that the moderate Republicans in the House are in trouble this time and the Republican party has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to even find pedophiles and gambling addicts for the Senate seat. The only scenario by which anyone actually sees a Republican taking the seat is if Lieberman runs as an independent and he and Lamont split the Democratic and Independent vote.
Perhaps that will come to pass, although I sincerely doubt it. But let’s say it does. Why would this be considered Lamont’s fault? He’s not the one who would be launching a third party candidacy when he failed in the primary.
It’s Joe Lieberman who would be playing the Ralph Nader role in this scenario, not Lamont. Everybody needs to keep that straight in their heads after August 8th if Lamont wins. The spoiler is the guy who runs the third party race, not the guy who gets the party nomination.
Here is a fascinating look at one of our government’s most important foreign policy innovators. Considering her extremely important position and intimate influence on the president one can’t help but wonder how the administration’s mid-east policy came to be so simplistic and infused with magical thinking:
As part of her job, this Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate in journalism and English from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and former Texas television reporter, still writes news scripts — to the world.
In the past year, she has created the “rapid response unit” to monitor global media, produce a daily summary of driving news and put out the government’s cohesive response. Every cabinet secretary, ambassador, military commander gets these pages. “This was my effort to try, literally, to get the federal government on the same page.”
Her next major assignment is to lead an interagency process in writing a strategic communications plan — this time for the entire U.S. government.
“I will frequently say, ‘I’ve been doing so many meetings, I can’t get any work done.’ I have to have time to think and have time to write. I’m very verbal, I like to talk, I like people, but I’m also a writer.” What she goes home to write, these days, is this master plan.
[…]
Despite her resistance to meetings, her top management tip is for a manager to spend time with his/her own people — and not to pigeonhole them in their job descriptions. She likes a “very collaborative approach so we have very interesting staff meetings, lots of ideas and laughs.
“I’m an idea factory. My staff laughs at me. If I’ve had a really good exercise night, I’ll come in the next morning and have several ideas.“
[…]
She says that it is “vitally important for our children to foster better relationships between America and people of different countries and cultures. I mean children in Canada, children in the United States, my own son, children around the world.”
She has three job goals:
First: “Foster a sense of hope and opportunity. These are rooted in our values, beginning with our belief in the dignity of every person — in every person’s right to live in freedom, in equality, in a just society.”
Second: “Work to marginalize the violent extremists and to confront their ideology of tyranny and hate. I really believe that’s vitally important for our children to have a peaceful future.”
Third: “Foster a sense of common interests and values between Americans and Canadians and people across the world. We have to be able to communicate a common humanity. You can’t, I wouldn’t think, blow up a bomb next to someone you see is a human being who has a lot in common with you.”
[…]
What will history say about this president?
“I believe they’ll say that he championed freedom and democracy and changed a volatile and dangerous region into one that was more, much more, hopeful and optimistic.”
And, on the economic front, after the 2000 stock market bubble burst after 9/11, she says, “they’ll say that his tax cuts helped avoid significant economic disruption.”
As for herself, she continues to craft and deliver the Bush administration’s public message.
Her nighttime reading is telling. A re-reading of Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, about a building in Cairo and all its inhabitants. And, at her bedside, evangelist Billy Graham’s new book, The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World.
It’s this kind of thing that explains how Dick Cheney came to be so powerful.
How Do You Like Your Democratic Iraq Now, Mr Lieberman?
by digby
So I hear that the national political press corps is about to descend on Connecticut like a swarm of locusts to cover the Lieberman Lamont primary in its final week. They are going to be following Joe around in a bus apparently.
This is good news, actually. Maybe they can finally get him to answer a few questions about Iraq, which he has suddenly clammed up about. It seems like only yesterday that Joe was saying stuff like this every day:
“We have reached an important milestone and achieved a new momentum in reaching a goal all Americans should embrace – building a secure, peaceful, democratic Iraq that is no longer a threat to the United States or the international community,”
Now, not so much.
If I were a real journalist and I had a chance to chat with Joe, I’d ask him if he still thinks that’s true in light of his fellow Senators’ condemnation of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s remarks about Israel. It seems nobody has yet been able to get him to explain this.
He did attend and applaud Maliki’s speech, but failed to appear afterwards when reporters were asking questions. He’s been so busy bragging about his earmarks and having his campaign place flyers in black neighborhoods accusing Lamont of being a racist (Lee Atwater would be proud) that perhaps he hasn’t had time to weigh in on the most pressing foreign policy issues of the day.
Still, Joe is a man of principle and mid-east policy is his signature issue, so I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to take questions. Joe has been like a proud papa about this new Iraqi government. I’m curious what he thinks of it now, aren’t you?
…the Senate needs collegial moderates who work across party lines. It’s the only way to stop the really bad stuff. And the revival of the romance of the antiwar left is a potential disaster for the Democrats. That’s what gave the world Richard Nixon in 1968, when ideologically pure liberals who had backed Eugene McCarthy in the primaries refused to rally around Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was “complicit” in the Vietnam War machine.
Apparently, challenging someone in Senate primary is comparable to people sitting out an election as a protest. I’m not sure why that is. If there is a move afoot to sit out the election, I haven’t seen any sign of it. But hey, it’s always 1968 in the DC establishment’s mind so let’s get groovy and smoke a doobie.
And I’d love to know what “really bad stuff” has been stopped by Joe Lieberman lately. The last I heard he was signing on to illegal domestic spying and indefinite prison sentences at Gitmo. He didn’t think Abu Ghraib was such a big deal and certainly didn’t lead the fight against torture. I haven’t heard a word from him about signing statements or what to do about the black hole money pit that is Iraq. If that’s the result of compromise, what in the hell were the Republicans originally trying to do — institute capital punishment for eating falafels?
Clinton managed to forge a pragmatic center for Democrats, which is why he didn’t hesitate to campaign last week for Lieberman. Clinton’s strong support may well pull the man who once called his behavior “disgraceful” over the finish line. It’s also a warm-up for selling his pro-war wife to skeptical liberals.
A lot of thanks Clinton got for his pragmatic centrism, too. He came within a hairsbreadth of being driven from office (with the help of his friend Joe)and when the Republicans took over they took the pragmatic surplus he created, handed it out to their rich friends and then proceeded to govern from as far right as they could possibly get with no thought to “collegial” moderation.
Grover Norquist said it and he meant it: they Republicans consider bi-partisanship date rape — and it ain’t the Democrats who are slipping the roofies in the kool-aid.
At some point in the last five years it should have occurred to Joe, who had no wingnut constituents to whom he needed to pander, that he was being used like a blow-up doll at a frat party.
The bloggers who have noisily intervened deny they’re interested in ideological purity. They point to their support in Senate races for pro-life candidates. But on Iraq, the liberal blogs brook no dissent.
The Iraq war is not a tiny little policy difference. It has endangered our economic health and our national security. It’s a matter of life and death. Is there anything these Washington insiders believe is worth fighting for? If “brooking no dissent” means that I think the Democratic party should stand with the large majority of Americans who want us out of Iraq, then I guess I’m guilty. On the war, there really should be NO controversy within the party, and there really isn’t except among DC insiders whose irrational fear of hippies has them paralyzed on the greatest issues of our time.
Not that it matters in Connecticut. If Lamont wins, only the laziest analysts can attribute it to the Netroots. Daily Kos is not exactly Topic A in the diners and union halls of the Nutmeg State.
But if the blogs aren’t a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They’re helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call “projection,” where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman. But in doing so, they have neglected what FDR called “the putting of first things first.” Job one for Democrats is identifying which Republican House incumbents are vulnerable in their own states and directing all available energy against them. Savaging fellow Democrats (except those who cannot win) should come after taking control, not before.
Bloggers are doing just what Alter says they should be doing, championing candidates across the country, liberal centrist and conservative, to beat Republicans. Clearly, he isn’t following the netroots very closely. There is one primary going on in Connecticut featuring one Democratic incumbent whose challenger is being championed by bloggers. The intention was that this challenge would be over on August 8th at which point everyone would gather around the winner and on to victory in November.
Except there’s now a little wrinkle. Joe Lieberman is apparently determined to run as an independent and put the safe Democratic seat at risk. I don’t know why the bloggers or Lamont are being admonished for failing to put the party first, when all they did was stage a primary challenge, a very basic act of democracy.
Perhaps Alter should have a chat with Joe and his people about “putting first things first” eh?
The challenge facing voters this year is not to hold Democrats accountable for their heresies but Republicans accountable for where they have taken the country. They are the ones in power, not Joe Lieberman.
There’s only one Democrat being held accountable for his “heresies” and that’s Joe Lieberman. And that’s because this election is a referendum on George W. Bush and Republican rule. Unlike many Republican politicians, Lieberman refused to distance himself from Bush and the Republicans when presented with a challenger. And like other Republicans who refuse to admit the error of their ways, he stands to lose this election because of it. When a “throw the bums out” election comes along, it’s only smart to try not to be lumped in with them.
This isn’t about a 60’s style liberal “anti-war movement,” which was a massive youth movement built around the draft coupled with huge social and cultural upheaval. This is just people trying to elect representatives to national office who represent their views. Despite all this blather about “congenial bipartisanship” the Republican Party went so far right they went off the cliff — people are doing the predictable (and responsible) thing and pushing back. Many of them care passionately about their country and are frightened of the direction in which it’s going. They are trying to do something about it. Is that really so scary?
This is just plain old politics, nothing unusual about it except we organize and talk over the internets. America hasn’t heard much from liberals in a while but we’ve been out here the whole time — and our policies have remained popular in spite of all the vilification we’ve endured because of the pathological fear of hippies that permeates the Democratic establishment.
Roll up a fattie, put on some Buffallo Springield and kick back, boys. It really isn’t the end of the world if Democrats feel some passion about their politics. Human beings need some of that to be motivated. And so do political parties.
July 30, 2006 Editorial A Senate Race in Connecticut
Earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman’s seat seemed so secure that — legend has it — some people at the Republican nominating convention in Connecticut started making bleating noises when the party picked a presumed sacrificial lamb to run against the three-term senator, who has been a fixture in Connecticut politics for more than 35 years.
But Mr. Lieberman is now in a tough Democratic primary against a little-known challenger, Ned Lamont. The race has taken on a national character. Mr. Lieberman’s friends see it as an attempt by hysterical antiwar bloggers to oust a giant of the Senate for the crime of bipartisanship. Lamont backers — most of whom seem more passionate about being Lieberman opponents — say that as one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq war, Mr. Lieberman has betrayed his party by cozying up to President Bush.
This primary would never have happened absent Iraq. It’s true that Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass. But if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum. He has voted with his party in opposing the destructive Bush tax cuts, and despite some unappealing rhetoric in the Terri Schiavo case, he has strongly supported a woman’s right to choose. He has been one of the Senate’s most creative thinkers about the environment and energy conservation.
But this race is not about résumés. The United States is at a critical point in its history, and Mr. Lieberman has chosen a controversial role to play. The voters in Connecticut will have to judge whether it is the right one.
As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans. “What kind of Democratic Party are we going to have?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “You’ve got to agree 100 percent, or you’re not a good Democrat?”
That’s far from the issue. Mr. Lieberman is not just a senator who works well with members of the other party. And there is a reason that while other Democrats supported the war, he has become the only target. In his effort to appear above the partisan fray, he has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates.
Citing national security, Mr. Bush continually tries to undermine restraints on the executive branch: the system of checks and balances, international accords on the treatment of prisoners, the nation’s longtime principles of justice. His administration has depicted any questions or criticism of his policies as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists. And Mr. Lieberman has helped that effort. He once denounced Democrats who were “more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq” than on supporting the war’s progress.
At this moment, with a Republican president intent on drastically expanding his powers with the support of the Republican House and Senate, it is critical that the minority party serve as a responsible, but vigorous, watchdog. That does not require shrillness or absolutism. But this is no time for a man with Mr. Lieberman’s ability to command Republicans’ attention to become their enabler, and embrace a role as the president’s defender.
•
On the Armed Services Committee, Mr. Lieberman has left it to Republicans like Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to investigate the administration’s actions. In 2004, Mr. Lieberman praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for expressing regret about Abu Ghraib, then added: “I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized.” To suggest even rhetorically that the American military could be held to the same standard of behavior as terrorists is outrageous, and a good example of how avidly the senator has adopted the Bush spin and helped the administration avoid accounting for Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Lieberman prides himself on being a legal thinker and a champion of civil liberties. But he appointed himself defender of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration’s policy of holding hundreds of foreign citizens in prison without any due process. He seconded Mr. Gonzales’s sneering reference to the “quaint” provisions of the Geneva Conventions. He has shown no interest in prodding his Republican friends into investigating how the administration misled the nation about Iraq’s weapons. There is no use having a senator famous for getting along with Republicans if he never challenges them on issues of profound importance.
If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.
Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction. We endorse Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary for Senate in Connecticut.
Do you ever notice those older ladies who still wear their hair in the style they first adopted when they were 22 years old? Or eyeglasses? For some reason they never noticed that 40 years have passed since they first wore that style and they’ve never thought to take a look in the mirror and assess whether it still suits them.
That’s what the Washington political establishment is like when it comes to the Democratic party. They are still wearing their 60’s era cat-eye bifocals and helmet-head beehives long after they ceased to be fashionable.
The people backing Lamont are nothing if not sincere. But their breed of Democrats — many of them wealthy, educated, extremely liberal — often pick candidates who are rejected by the broader public. Many of the older Lamont supporters went straight from Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern in the 1960s and ’70s to Howard Dean in 2004. They helped Joe Duffey challenge Sen. Tom Dodd in Connecticut for the 1970 Democratic nomination on the Vietnam War issue, only to lose to Republican Lowell Weicker in November. Lamont’s campaign manager, Tom Swan, is also director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group, a populist organization founded in the 1970s by Toby Moffett, a Ralph Nader protege and anti-Vietnam activist who was one of the “Watergate babies” elected to the House in 1974. Moffett’s political career also was ended by a loss to Weicker, who stayed in the Senate until Lieberman finally beat him in 1988.
Gosh, don’t tell anybody, but Joe Lieberman ran Bobby Kennedy’s Connecticut campaign in 1968. In fact, if you look at most professional Democratic politicians over the age of 50, you can probably find a connection to that unreconstructed hippy hero George McGovern within one degree of separation. I guess that explains everything.
I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about when he says that those who voted for McCarthy and McGovern went directly to Dean. If these “political activists” were old enough to vote in 1968 you can bet they also voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore and Kerry. I voted for all those guys. It’s simpleminded bullshit to say that the biggest threat to the party is liberal elites. We’ve been voting for every preachy southern conservative and every bland technocratic centrist they’ve thrown at us since 1976. (It sure would have been really great if even one of them — except Carter, who barely pulled it off — could have won a fucking electoral majority! )
This is a deep and festering illness within political circles for which the only cure is to plug your ears and stop listening to the geezers. As far as David Broder and his ilk are concerned, nothing consequential has happened in the Democratic party in 38 years. That’s the whole ball of wax — “liberal insurgents,” “silent majority” “Anti-Vietnam activist” all of it. Their irrational fear of hippies has rendered them incompetent to understand current politics for what they really are. And it has handed the Republicans the most powerful weapon in ther arsenal.
The thing that scared the straights (like Broder, I’m sure, considering his panic over the Clintons) back in the day was massive numbers of young long haired males and liberated braless women and blacks with huge afros that theatened all their fundamental beliefs about how society was supposed to operate. This was a jarring social and cultural change from the super conformist 50’s and it freaked people out.
The political issues were just a small part of why people voted for Nixon both times and why the political establishment moved to the right (as the culture itself grew ever more liberal.) Broder and his pals’ facile rendering of that history has pretty much crippled liberalism for almost 40 years and it’s long past time that we ignored those who persist in perpetuating it.