Defending Lieberman From The Nutroots®
Jonathan Chait is no fan of Joe Lieberman:
Lieberman, unlike other Democratic hawks, musters little passion for exposing and correcting the massive blunders the Bush administration has committed. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Lieberman noted, in Bush’s defense, “Those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, never apologized.” (As if anybody was suggesting we were as bad as the terrorists.) Last fall he said, “In matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” The clear implication is that it’s counterproductive — traitorous, even — to call the administration on its foreign policy dishonesties. This is not how the loyal opposition in a democracy ought to behave.
Foreign policy is hardly the only smudge on Lieberman’s record. He is a longtime supporter of taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income — a stance gratifying to owners of stock but lacking in economic sense or basic fairness. He has long opposed sensible financial regulations. Even after his pro-business stance came under fire in the wake of the Enron scandal, Lieberman opposed sensible reforms. (As one of Lieberman’s friends told the New Republic’s Michael Crowley in 2002, “It’ll be remembered that he didn’t go off the deep end” — meaning, after the populist furor dies down, Lieberman could resume raking in contributions from grateful executives.) He supported the disgraceful energy bill and federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.
Ned Lamont will not be getting Chait’s endorsement, however; Chait is better known as the Senior Editor of the New Republic, the centrist magazine of the Left that is far more comfortable with the DLC than Howard Dean’s DNC.
As much as Chait obviously disdains Lieberman, he sees his defense as a symbolic stand against the Nutroots®. Do I exaggerate? Hardly:
In the end…I can’t quite root for Lieberman to lose his primary. What’s holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has come to stand for much more than Lieberman’s sins. It’s a test of strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary challengers against them.
Chait hits on a real truth here; as much as Glenn Greenwald and the other supporters of the ‘Bush Cult’ theory would like to believe in a monolithic, knee-jerk Right that supports Bush come hell or high water, such a group, if indeed it exists at all, is exceedingly small and without influence.
It is in fact, the ‘Progressive’ Left (not the monolithic Left – I’m speaking here of the activist type who supported Dean, reads Kos and Huff’n'Puff daily, believes in the ‘controlled demolition’ of the WTC, and believes The Nation and Mother Jones have sold out to the man – and you know the type, don’t you?) that brooks no opposition and tars and feathers anyone who steps out of line (witness the quick elevation of Stephen Colbert into a untouchable saint). These people are small in numbers, too, but because they tend to gravitate around a few well-known websites, and because they did, let’s face it, succeed in having a financial impact in 2004, they have an outsized influence compared to the votes they can reliably deliver.
Chait is right to defend Lieberman, even if he’s wrong in his condemnation of the man’s bipartisanship (why is it that everyone worships at the alter of phony, in-name-only bipartisanship, but spits on anyone who deigns to actually practice it?). He needn’t worry, though, Lamont will not – you can bet the farm on it – come within 20 points of Lieberman.
Kos is silent on the challenge for now – but you can bet he won’t stay that way. The egotistical ‘kingmaker’ from Berkeley is physically unable to restrain himself from petulant shows of ‘power’ when challenged like this. His reaction, when it comes – soon – will be an ample demonstration of the verity of Chait’s hypothesis. Stay tuned…
“As if anybody was suggesting we were as bad as the terrorists.”
They have quite often, if I recall correctly.
Comrades,
Correct. Remember the one’s saying how much better Iraq was off under Saddam? They are the ideological children and grandchildren of those who said Hitler was just misunderstood. More revisionist-historians and worshipers of the cult of A.J.P. Taylor.
Respects,
Gwedd
No, I think by saying we should apologize for certain actions liberals are suggesting we are better than the terrorists and ought to prove it.
Also, shout out to Aaron, I graduated from RHIT in ‘02.
Wow! So that’s two Rose grads I’ve come across through this site. Chip Bennet (RHIT ‘00) — http://www.chipbennett.net/ — contacted me a little while back.
That aside, mikebdot, I concur. It was ridiculous when Biden was lecturing (I don’t even remember who was on the receiving end of it) about how we should follow the Geneva Convention so that his son wouldn’t be tortured by Al Qaeda if he were captured.
Nothing the US can do will ever cause these people not to act like the monsters and animals that they are (short of killing them, of course), but we shouldn’t bring ourselves to their level if for no other reason than to go up even further on the moral high ground we already occupy.
Didn’t know Chip Bennett. I kept to myself mostly, plus he was two years older…
I don’t care much for Biden. But, then again, I don’t care much for most politicians. I did happen to agree with Biden’s overall point though. We should act as humanely as we can when fighting the war of the president’s choosing.
I don’t necessarily agree with your sentiment regarding people acting like monsters and animals. That is a long discussion though that I don’t have time for today. My position in a nutshell: Vengeance is poor public policy. There is no high moral ground when fighting a war. My father, too, also seems content to go over there and try to kill them all, but I just don’t think that is good policy. We need to lead by example. Do unto others. The golden rule. No country has ever tried this. Talk about high moral ground we could have taken. Oh well. War is much more satisfying.
“There is no high moral ground when fighting a war.”
Not even when fighting the Nazis? or the Islamafascists today?
If your point is that war is ugly, then I agree, but your plans for the peace when it comes (not how to attain the peace, which the Administration has botched in Iraq, but the kind of society you intend to build) can definitely give you the moral high ground. America seeks, and has sought throughout the 20th century, to spread democracy and freedom. It has, at times, used less than reputable methods to acheive this end, but its goal has always been more admirable than those of its enemies: the Nazis who sought to slaughter all those inferior, the Soviets and Maoists with their purges of all dissenting voices, and today, the Muslim fanatics who seek to slaughter the infidels wholesale. And the treatment of the enemies during a war also gives moral high ground. We gave Moussoui (sp?) a trial. It might not have been the fairest in the world — but then again, he isn’t going to be executed — but it is more than Al Qaeda gives to the Westerners it captures.
“Do unto others. The golden rule. No country has ever tried this.”
Jimmy Carter kind of did — the “Good Neighbor Policy,” I believe it was called. It’s one of the reasons his presidency was such a failure. What’s worse: being called a belligerent country while standing up for the weak and helpless — like the French, the Koreans, the Poles, the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Kurds, the Iraqi Shia, the Iranian people — against those who are stronger, or laying back and letting others be slaughtered just so that we as Americans can claim to be peaceful?
We did not take the high moral ground when attacking Nazi Germany. We didn’t go in there to stop the concentration camps. We went in there after 2 years (yes we funded some before that) and only because we were attacked directly. How long do you think we would have waited to join had Pearl Harbor not occurred? Also, read up on the people WE sterilized. The eugenics crowd was pretty strong here too (65,000 people). Attacking a country only when you are “forced” to do so in order to survive is NOT moral high ground. Nor is dropping nuclear weapons when the fighting is pretty much over or destroying Dresden (even if they were the center of most of Germany’s war machine) in the same circumstances. We attacked the Nazis because it was in our interests to do so (and because they declared war on us), not because of high moral standing. Defending oneself from death has nothing to do with morality.
I think the spreading of “democracy” and freedom is necessary to some extent, but it can be done without invading nations. The best freedom and most enduring freedom is freedom that is demanded by the people living in a country, not people invading the country. How did we obtain our freedom and “democracy”? This is what I mean by “lead by example”. Make the country the best it can be, lead well, don’t meddle in others affairs and show the world how it can be. We do a great job of this most of the time and I think that, more than anything, is why freedom and “democracy” is spreading. And yes, this paragraph means that if civil war breaks out in Iraq, I don’t necessarily think that is a “bad” thing for the formation of their government, but it is definitely bad for us as we are still there. I think civil strife is necessary for progress to occur in any nation. Hopefully it can occur in Iraq without a full-fledged civil war occurring, but, like I said, I don’t think that would necessarily say anything about where they will end up.
The only reason the Carter presidency “failed” is because the economy sucked and that was no fault of his. The global marketplace whipped our asses in the 70s and the early 80s. Japan worked us over. I still don’t quite know what to make of the Carter presidency. There was so much wrong with the economy in the 70s to make heads or tails of what Carter actually did to affect it.
We weren’t attacked directly by Germany, though…and Roosevelt had all but declared war with Lend/Lease (it took Pearl Harbor to bring a reluctant Congress and American public along)…
I know this, but they declared war on us and that was that.
I have to take exception also with the idea that the fighting was pretty much over when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We didn’t have a single soldier on the mainland of Japan – I’m sure you’ve seen the estimates that we might have taken as many as a million casualties had we been forced to launch an amphibious invasion.
[...] When Jonathan Chait took on the Nutroots® so publicly, I quite confidently predicted Kos would never be able to maintain his silence. His petulance when challenged is legendary, and today, the inevitable response came: …[T]he part about us being “extremists” blah blah blah is obvious crap. Chait knows better. Or should. So either he’s a moron, or he’s being intellectually dishonest. Probably a little of both. [...]
An amphibious invasion was not the only other possible course of action. They would have run out of resources (help from Europe). But that is a topic of a different color I suppose.
I agree with Chait in that Lieberman’s defense is some sort of weird defense against the Nutroots. Of course, that is rather silly as the Nutroots are gaining in spending power and can very easily be courted by actually having a spine. I think that is the definition of “progressive” in today’s partisan love-fest. Being “independent from the liberal establishment” has been equated with “progressive”. The people that the nutroots tend to support are those that break away from current liberal trends and are neo-liberal (can I coin that term or has it been used?) in that they actually talk like liberals who actually had spines.