Who would have thought that Republicans, who just six years ago stormed the Miami-Dade County civic center holding hundreds of signs reading "Sore Loserman," would be now shedding crocodile tears for the political career of the number two Democrat on the 2000 ticket? Republicans might soon lament that their favorite Democrat will be put to pasture because even in Bush's America there still exists a faint heartbeat of democracy.
Senator Joseph Lieberman's interminable moralizing and his supercilious disquisitions on the evils of everything from violent video games to presidential blowjobs are belied by the immorality of his role as the uncritical cheerleader for the real-life killing game in Iraq. Just as Alan Colmes is the most important persona on Fox News because he offers faux "balance," Joe Lieberman is the most important national politician for the Republican one-party state because he offers a legitimizing veneer of faux debate and bipartisanship. I wish Lieberman would have shown one one-hundredth of the moral outrage toward the bloodbath in Iraq as he did toward Bill Clinton's schoolboy petting of Monica.
Rightwingers like David Brooks and Fred Barnes call the candidacy of Ned Lamont a "single issue" anti-war campaign, run by crazy people from the blogosphere, an "inquisition" inside the Democratic Party destroying the careers of "moderates" and "centrists" with a "litmus test" on the war in Iraq. They seem to want to return to the era before the 17th Amendment gave ordinary citizens the right to participate in the direct election of Senators. There were no "litmus tests" then. (Memo to Democrats: don't take tactical political advice from Republicans, they probably don't have your best interests in mind.)
We do not need more Liebermans. Just look at the state of the Democratic Party: losing the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years (1994); Gore/Lieberman (2000); Max Clelend, Dick Gephardt, the Senate (2002); Gray Davis (2003); Kerry/Edwards, Tom Daschle (2004). The "centrist" strategy of "Republican-lite" has failed miserably, bringing us wars, Constitutional abuses, deficits, signing statements, a judiciary modeled on Antonin Scalia, environmental degradation, and all of the other attendant civic atrocities of the Republican juggernaut.
In 1968, when New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy challenged President Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primaries it was because of the Administration's commitment to the war in Vietnam. When Kennedy took on the incumbent president he faced harsh criticism from pro-war Democrats similar in tone to some of the recent attacks on Ned Lamont. Like Lamont, Kennedy ran a grassroots campaign and he was extremely wealthy, and his opponents held these against him.
Kennedy ran as a peace candidate against a president who had delivered for the liberal agenda. Johnson had pushed through the Congress the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Medicare and Medicaid, fair housing, student loans, consumer protection, etc. But it was the Vietnam War -- that "single issue" -- that led Kennedy to seek the nomination. All of this talk about Ned Lamont upsetting a Liberal stalwart embodied in Joe Lieberman is a joke. Lieberman's "liberal" record -- supporting NAFTA, ending AFDC, taking money from Enron, etc. -- is nothing compared to LBJ's.
As Donald Rumsfeld's testimony last week indicates, we are now expected to claim a victory because the country that we have given 2,600 lives and $325 billion to defend has not yet slid into total civil war. Well done! And Joe Lieberman still supports this folly.
Robert Kennedy was also alarmed that the war in Vietnam had eroded the standing of the United States in the eyes of the world. Kennedy said that the US slaughter of innocents in Southeast Asia had led "our best and oldest friends to ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America?"
The kinky torture at Abu Ghraib, the mass killings in Haditha, and the rape of a 14-year old girl and the murder of her family in Mahmudiya, have done more damage to the idea that America is bringing "democracy" to Iraq than any other events. The current US-Israeli destruction of Lebanon, with its multiple war crimes, has delivered the coup de grace to the Bush Administration's project for a "new Middle East." Does it give Joe Lieberman pause that nearly the entire world is against what the United States is doing in that beleaguered region?
Both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that the goals of social reform at home died in the jungles of Vietnam. For every American in poverty, they said, the US government spent $52; and for every "Vietcong" killed, over $120,000. Today, the spilling of American blood and treasure in Iraq is not an "issue" that can be shunted aside so we can indulge in cheery talk about health care, education, and the environment. As long as that occupation continues it will be a debilitating drain on scarce resources that we need to invest here at home; resources upon which any Democratic agenda worthy of the name depends.
"No war has ever demanded more bravery from our people and our government," Kennedy said about Vietnam, "not just the bravery under fire or the bravery to make sacrifices, but the bravery to discard the comfort of illusion, to do away with false hopes and alluring promises."
The Democratic voters of Connecticut have the opportunity to begin the long process of cutting through the illusions of the war in Iraq, and extricating our country from the icy grip of the Republican Party.