The Unraveling Of Joe Lieberman

[babylonsister]

Irregular Joe by Jonathan Chait
The Zell Millerization of Joe Lieberman.
Post Date Wednesday, June 25, 2008


Watching Joe Lieberman go around the bend over the last couple years is one of the strangest things I've ever seen in politics. Lieberman was always a foreign policy hawk and a capital gains tax cutter, and he generally took enormous pleasure in staying in the right's good graces. But it is also these very qualities--his ideological moderation, his aversion to conflict, his timorous demeanor--that have made his recent apoplexy so weird.

Lieberman, naturally, sees things a bit differently. In a series of speeches, op-eds, and interviews, he has been making the case that he, Joe Lieberman, has resolutely stood behind his lifelong ideology while the entire rest of the Democratic Party has gone off the McGovernite cliff. In his telling, the party was hawkish from World War II through the early 1960s. Then it was taken over by left-wing isolationists who were "viscerally opposed to the use of military force." Under Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the party recovered its hawkish legacy, but, in the last few years, Democrats-- presumably including Clinton and Gore themselves--have "resurrected the profoundly wrong and persistently unsuccessful McGovern-Carter worldview."

You might wonder precisely which ways McGovern's nefarious ideology is making itself felt. Lieberman says that Democrats, who were once "unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders," now "minimize the seriousness of the threat from Islamic extremism." Lieberman prefers them to use morally confident language like this:

The terrorists are at war with us. The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real. They distort Islam. They kill man, woman, and child; Christian and Hindu, Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for.

Oh, wait--that passage was Barack Obama, speaking last summer. Lieberman further complains, "The top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq."

[Dhalgren]

1. The "War on Terror" is a fraud and Obama should know that.

We don't need a bigger military, we need to use the one we have less.

Trying to show how Obama is more to the right than Lieberman says, is not a good thing for Obama. Lieberman is a tool, but showing Obama to be in the "kill, kill, kill" camp is not helpful...

:eyes:

[babylonsister]

2. Except you're reading it wrong because you want to. Obama

wants to target the real terrorists, not everyone in the Middle East like Lieberman does. :eyes:

[Dhalgren]

3. He talks about

creating the "caliphate"? That is code and you know it. The "terrorist" threat is minimal and criminal in nature, not an ideological threat the way the WOT-bunch would have it. The IRA was much, much more of a threat to Britain than this handful of nut-jobs are to the US. Kerry was right, Bin Laden and his rag-tag group should be hunted down and prosecuted criminally, not militarily.

And am I wrong, or isn't this editorial trying to say that Obama is more right-leaning than Lieberman is saying? And we should all feel good about that, why?

[atreides1]

5. Lieberman doesn't want to target everyone in the Middle East

Just Muslims, Arabs, Lebanese, Egyptians, Iraqis, Iranians, everyone but Israelis it seems.

[babylonsister]

6. That's right! My bad. nt

[tabasco]

4. McGovern was a war hero.

Lieberman is a gutless, cowardly piece of shit.

Just thought I would point that out.