Remember last year when we were hoping that Democratic voters in Connecticut would not make the mistake of electing a Republican to the Senate? Joe Lieberman? Remember the Democratic operatives and even some Senators who thought that description was over the top? The proof is in the pudding head. Read this account of the speech the “Independent Democrat” gave last week.
Thursday, Joe gave a morning talk at The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and Friday, I read it in an advanced state of stupefaction. Here was a United States Senator talking, and talking ... and talking, and sealing his diagnostic fate with every word. He had come with a dagger in his teeth, but proved only the need for a needle in the arm.
His target? Democrats. Pretty much all Democrats -- the base, the candidates, the blogospheric backgrounders and any peripheral hangers on. That in itself, God knows, is no sign of insanity, since no one excels at self-loathing like Democrats themselves. But it was the foils that Joe chose to make Democrats look ridiculous that boomeranged throughout, paradoxically making the latter's case and utterly destroying the pixilated prosecutor.
There was far too much in Joe's unhinged torrent to cover in detail here, but a few droplets should suffice for your reasoned consideration.
"Since retaking Congress in November 2006," Joe began, "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, to abandon the democratically-elected [sic] government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush."
Joe Lieberman would be just another talk show flake if Al Gore hadn’t listened to the idiots telling him that running him for VP would be a good way to distance himself from Bill Clinton. He was a talking head precisely due to his demonstrated disloyalty to Democrats. He was operating as a Republican shill even while he was posing as a Democrat in the Senate. His role in the aftermath of the vote in 2000 was notable for its helpfulness for the Bush Crime Family in their theft of the election. He has gone from being a Republican enabler to being one of their most trusted tools. Since his failure to get the nomination for President in 2004 and his failure to get the Democratic nomination in his last Senate bid, Joe Lieberman has been on a campaign to destroy the Democratic majority and will almost certainly do his best to elect a Republican as President.
Al Gore knows who those idiots are, the people in his campaign know who they are, we can only suspect who they are. There needs to be a rule for Democrats, people who make mistakes as big as promoting Joe Lieberman get one, and only one disaster. Someone who makes a mistake as big as promoting Joe Lieberman should never, ever be allowed to work on an important Democratic campaign again.
The pundits and insiders think that they are not expendable but at the level of national and state politics, they are not only expendable, they should serve only on continuing and proven merit. And in politics merit is judged only on winning elections and making laws. It is so important that only the best should be allowed to serve us. No one who advised Al Gore to select Joe Lieberman and no one who encouraged Democratic voters to support him for the Senate last year have any credibility left.