Juan Cole outs Lieberman as a neofasc... conservative

[Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers@xxxxxxxxx>]

> The answer is that on foreign policy issues, Lieberman is a
> Neoconservative, and supports the Iraq project for the same reasons
> that Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz (then number 3 and 2
> respectively at the Pentagon) did. He tried to put himself in the
> tradition of Hubert Humphrey, but he was more honest when he also
> listed Scoop Jackson. Perle and the rest started on Jackson's staff.
>
> In keeping with his foreign policy neoconservatism, Lieberman has
> McCarthyite tendencies and actually joined forces with Lynne Cheney to
> attack academics for being "un-American" if they questioned the
> central narrative of the Bush administration, which is that terrorism
> springs from intrinsic evil and that it is so powerful a threat that
> we Americans must now give up our traditions of free speech and
> dissent. Lieberman's McCarthyism is shameful, and all thinking
> Americans must rejoice to see Lynne's partner in auto-da-fe go down in
> flames.
.

Lieberman's Defeat
http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/liebermans-defeat-it-is-very-important.html
[Informative links on page]

It is very important that Joe Lieberman was defeated in the Democratic
primary in Connecticut on Tuesday, for the following reasons.

First of all, the man was brain dead on the Iraq issue. He seems
seriously to have believed that the violence in Iraq only affected a
third of the country (he appears not to have heard of Maysan or Basra
provinces), and kept saying the most wildly optimistic things about the
near future in the face of masses of evidence that Iraq was sinking
faster than a two-ton truck in a quicksand patch. This Panglossian
narrative about Iraq gave enormous aid and comfort to Bush and the
Republican Party.

Second and more important, Lieberman had aimed a poisoned arrow at the
heart of every Democratic candidate when he said,


   ' "While dissent about the war is critically important and American,
partisan dissent has no place when it comes to our national security,
particularly when we have 130,000 Americans over there in uniform," he
said. "So I refuse to take partisan shots at the president or anybody
else about the war." '



Lieberman's stance would have been quoted ad nauseam in Republican Party
advertisements. They would have used a leading Democrat to swiftboat the
rest of the Party.

Lieberman had bought into the Rove Master Narrative. Bush went to war
electively, thus very conveniently making himself a war president and
therefore above criticism. He got a second term that way despite having
been among the worst presidents in history. Lieberman ceded to Bush a
kind of invulnerability on the most important Republican Party SNAFU
since its policies contributed to the onset of the Great Depression. Why
would a Democrat do that?

The answer is that on foreign policy issues, Lieberman is a
Neoconservative, and supports the Iraq project for the same reasons that
Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz (then number 3 and 2 respectively at
the Pentagon) did. He tried to put himself in the tradition of Hubert
Humphrey, but he was more honest when he also listed Scoop Jackson.
Perle and the rest started on Jackson's staff.

In keeping with his foreign policy neoconservatism, Lieberman has
McCarthyite tendencies and actually joined forces with Lynne Cheney to
attack academics for being "un-American" if they questioned the central
narrative of the Bush administration, which is that terrorism springs
from intrinsic evil and that it is so powerful a threat that we
Americans must now give up our traditions of free speech and dissent.
Lieberman's McCarthyism is shameful, and all thinking Americans must
rejoice to see Lynne's partner in auto-da-fe go down in flames.

Lieberman had been allied with Christian fundamentalists in making an
assault on the separation of religion and state.

Finally, it is important because whether or not the liberal blogosphere
played a significant role in dumping him, many will say that it did.
Being perceived as powerful is almost as good as being powerful.

Lieberman may run as an independent, and we cannot know what will happen
in that case. But for the reasons given above, it is important that he
has been repudiated by Democratic voters. The rest of the party now has
a shot at taking the House, without risking having their colleague's
pro-Bush sanctimonies on Iraq constantly thrown in their faces. And the
menace of senatorial McCarthyism and a further assault on the liberties
of all Americans may have been forestalled.

posted by Juan @ 8/09/2006 06:27:00 AM