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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Joe Lieberman Profile in Political Courage

The silly part of the whole thing is it was the Connecticut Democratic party that chased Senator Joe Lieberman out of the party and so soon after he was the party hero---the hometown boy who almost became within a few hanging chads of becoming the first Jewish Vice President of the US. But on August 8, 2006, Lieberman conceded the Democratic primary to the George Soros -MoveOn.com candidate Ned Lamont, saying, "For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand," and announced he would run (and eventually did win) in the 2006 November election as an independent candidate on the Connecticut for Lieberman ticket, against both Lamont and the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger.

When he won he said that his "independent" tag is just a formality he still indented to caucus with the Democrats. But Joe still doesn't fall in line with the agenda of the Soros-controlled Democratic party so he was labeled"sanctimonious Joe."

But then Lieberman made a bigger mistake in the eyes of the George Soros controlled Democrats. He once again put his country in front of his party, this time by supporting John McCain for president. Now they not only Call him sanctimonious Joe, but they also call him a turncoat. I call him something else, a statesman:

The Defamation of Joe Lieberman

By Jamie Weinstein

FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, June 24, 2008

It was only eight years ago that Joe Lieberman was the toast of the Democratic Party. As Al Gore's running mate during the 2000 presidential election, nary a bad word could be said about the Connecticut senator. Few questioned his Democratic credentials. Few questioned his fidelity to the Democratic Party. Though open minded on some issues, he was a Democrat's Democrat.

Oh, how times have changed.

"There's hardly any sense in which [Joe] Lieberman is an independent figure," writes Jonathan Chait in a recent article in The New Republic magazine. "He's become a cog in the Republican message machine."

The article's subtitle was "The Zell Millerization of Joe Lieberman.

Time Magazine's Joe Klein has too seized upon the Zell Miller analogy, headlining a May anti-Lieberman screed on Time Magazine's Swampland blog "Zell Lieberman."

Attacking Lieberman in a May Salon.com article, Joe Conason called Lieberman "a turncoat surrogate for McCain" and attributed his endorsement of McCain for president as a gambit "for appointment as a token Democrat in a Republican Cabinet, or even a second nomination as vice president, on the Republican ticket."

Lieberman has not been a popular figure in Democratic politics recently, mainly emanating from his staunch and continued support of the Iraq War. Because of this, Lieberman was all but ignored when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. He faced a primary challenge from the left when he stood for re-election to the Senate in 2006. Though Lieberman lost in the primary, he soundly won the general election running as an Independent. Lieberman continued to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate despite labeling himself an "Independent Democrat."

Liberals are now further enraged with Lieberman because he has decided to support John McCain for president over their party's nominee, Barack Obama. While Lieberman's voting record is solidly to the left-of-center, he has made his decision to support the Republican nominee with the belief that the threat of Radical Islam is great and that John McCain is the best man to deal with the challenges that the war against it entails.

Not surprisingly, as the general election campaign gets under way, many liberals are uniting to attack Lieberman. One common refrain, as we saw above, is that Lieberman is nothing more than the Zell Miller of 2008. Miller, a former Democratic senator, supported George W. Bush in 2004 claiming that the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left.

But when you analyze both Miller's and Lieberman's voting records, you come to understand why the Lieberman/Miller analogy is so preposterous. Joe Lieberman actually votes like a Democrat. Except on a few issues, Lieberman votes the party line. An analysis of his recent voting record shows that he and the Democratic Party are in sync more than 80 percent of the time. Over Zell Miller's entire Senate career, from 2000 to 2005, Miller voted with Republicans nearly 80 percent of the time on issues where the two parties had different positions. In other words, Zell Miller was really a Republican in all but name when he supported George W. Bush in 2004. Joe Lieberman is a true blue Democrat who has decided to support John McCain.

The other defamatory charge against Lieberman, expressed most vividly by Joe Conason, is that he is supporting McCain for opportunistic reasons. According to this theory, Lieberman sees his support for McCain as a way to ensure a cabinet post in a McCain administration or even another shot at the vice presidency.

This, of course, doesn't pass the laugh test. When Lieberman endorsed McCain way back in mid-December 2007 – before a single Republican primary had taken place – McCain was just at the very beginning of his Phoenix-like rise to win the Republican nomination. A week before the endorsement, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed the Arizona senator garnering just 7 percent support nationally, tied with Fred Thompson and trailing Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

Moreover, McCain must be seen as the underdog in the general election with the Republican brand tarnished among many voters. If Lieberman was so opportunistic, why would he back the horse with the longer odds?

Just the opposite of being opportunistic, Lieberman's decision to support McCain comes with great risk. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, Joe Lieberman will find himself not in a McCain cabinet but back in a Senate controlled by Democrats. They will view Lieberman's support for McCain with disdain and his likely keynote address at the Republican National Convention as an act of great disloyalty.

While Democrats in the Senate have placated Lieberman since his 2006 re-election so he would caucus with them and thus allow them to maintain their one-seat majority, no such placating will be necessary in January 2009 when the Democrats are likely to control the Senate by a comfortable margin. And if that occurs, their supposedly "opportunistic" friend Joe Lieberman will likely be replaced as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. "Opportunistic" Joe will be a man without a home with little power to influence anything.

Despite attempts to defame him, Joe Lieberman is no turncoat or opportunist. He is a statesman who has made a politically risky decision that he believes is in the best interest of the country. He is a profile in political courage.


1 comment:

KELSO'S NUTS said...

Senor: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it isn't a woodcock.

Wasn't me that told Lieberman to praise John Hagee and every other evangelical cretin under the sun. Wasn't me who introduced rather "Marxist-Leninist" legislation to prevent "oil speculators" and "hedge-fund managers" from plying their trade in America. That would be Joe Lieberman.

I'd like to say that as a Panamanian Jew it doesn't matter to me, but it does. John McCain's "Cuban Independence Day" speech promised US troops in Colombia (his ally hardy-har-har) to act as a force to promote democracy in the region. That's Repubican-Lieberman-speak for "invade Colombia and try to seize the assets of every bank in Panama, Ecuador and Bolivia."

Thankfully, Joe Lieberman having shown his willingness to advocate the roasting of 100,000 Persian Jews in Iran for "greater stability," I can't be surprised that he doesn't know what Jewish and Muslim life is like down here. In Colombia especially.

See McCain and Holy Joe think they're going to quarter troops in Colombia. Naturally, the brass will want to take homes in the Jewish and Muslim parts of Barranquilla, Bogota, Cali and Medellin. What Holy Joe don't know is that Jews and Muslims get along as pan-Semitic cousins down here and have a lot of money and power. In those neighborhoods, every house on every golf course is behind razor wire with a private army on the roofs.

Feature this. Go to a bar mitzvah at the country club in Medellin sometime. There will be a mix of mostly Ashkenazim, some Sefardim and some Muslim kids. The bar mitzvah might have a theme of Tiger Woods or Kobe Bryant or Green Day like every bar mitzvah in the rest of the world, except the difference is that the kids who all go to private school and plan to go to college in the states or Europe have all the affect of the worst of an inner city Camden, NJ, Black kid.

Why? Because of the 80-year civil war over dope and money. These kids have all seen many male relatives shot or blown up by the time they were 9. They're perfectly nice kids but they're dead inside. Their mothers tell them if they see someone in a uniform near the house to take out their Glock and kill him. They'll do this and go back into the house and play Madden Football on their Nintendo like nothing happened.

This is how the wealthy children of Colombia act which is supposed to be McCain/Lieberman's ally. How do you reckon GI JOE will deal with that? How will they deal with real tough guys in the poor barrios? How will they deal with an 800,000 man Venezuelan army? How will McCain deal with trillions of USD in South American banks frozen solid?

As a Jew, I kind of like the idea of my people giving McCain and Liebeman a disaster far worse than Bagdad or Basra, but as a lover of humanity, I urge you to tell your neo-conservative Jewish friends to take off their rose-colored glass and stay away from South America and just stick to the fun they're having moving tin soldiers around Iraq and Afghanistan, because the whole narrative changes when there's urban warfare between US troops and South American Jews.

And, baby, don't count on Israel to take the goyishe side.