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Under democracy one party always
devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other
party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
~H.L. Mencken, 1956
Despite a last-minute false smear campaign
accusing his victorious opponent Ned Lamont with hacking the
Lieberman website (a lie which has gained the attention of FBI
investigators), three-term Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the Connecticut
Primary by over 10,000 votes. Upon losing, instead of the usual
"rally round the victor" concession speech, Bush's
favorite Democrat used the occasion to tout his "independent"
fall campaign for the same seat he'd just lost (most states have
"anti-spoiler" laws which would not allow such a travesty.)
Speaking
of Spoilers
Heard the one about how Ralph
Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election and gave us Bush and his
disastrous policies (most all favorably voted on by Lieberman)?
You might remember the Democratic
Party stalwarts' and media flaks vicious false charges against
Nader:
Senator Harry Reid D-NV said
of Nader the day after that fateful stolen election, "I
hope Ralph Nader is proud of himself," said Reid. "One
of the joys of waking up this morning was that egotistic bum
didn't get 5 percent of the vote (which would have qualified
the Green Party for federal funds)."
"He can wallow in his
mud. That is what he likes to wallow in anyway," Reid said.
"`I had very little respect for him and what I had is gone."
Reid directly blamed Nader
for Gore's "loss."
"You could be a second-grade
math student and figure that out," the senator said.
Now Senate Minority Leader,
Harry Reid had this to say when faced with another independent/third
party challenge --- from Lieberman in the Connecticut Senate
Race this fall; "I don't think it is fair for me to judge
what he (Lieberman) should or shouldn't do. He has told me what
he was going to do. He told me that before the election. I think
his decision has been made," Reid said.
"I love Joe Lieberman.
Joe and I have campaigned together, legislated together. But
it is pretty simple when you're Democratic leader and somebody
wins a Democratic primary," Reid says he considered not
backing Lamont and instead sticking with Lieberman, "but
I think I'd be subject to a lot of criticism."
From the
Horse's Mouth
In announcing his independent
run on the "Connecticut for Lieberman" ticket this
fall, the ever-sanctimonious Lieberman noted that he received
an election-eve "good luck" call from none other than
Karl Rove. Ironically, the senator's own campaign manager issued
a statement falsely accusing Lamont supporters of "Rovian
tactics" --- i.e. hacking the Lieberman website.
Lieberman also said it would
be "irresponsible and inconsistent with my principles"
to not run again in the fall. That "principle" must
be the same one that saw him hedge his bets and continue his
Senate reelection campaign while running for vice-president in
2000, even though a Gore/Lieberman victory would have meant a
Republican governor replacing Lieberman in the evenly-split Senate
with a Republican!
Yet, here's what Lieberman
said while losing the 2000 vice-presidency, "A vote for
Nader is a vote for Bush. I ask those who are thinking about
voting for Ralph Nader to decide how they feel - how George Bush
feels - about protecting the environment, protecting consumers,
protecting a woman's right to choose, because all of those may
well be in jeopardy if George Bush is elected president."
Lieberman saved some of his
fire after defeat for his erstwhile running mate whom he described
as "too populist" and that Gore's "people vs.
the powerful" rhetoric had a detrimental impact on the campaign.
(Any wonder Gore was nowhere to be seen touting Joe this time
around?)
Now we have the spectacle of
Lieberman who once positioned himself decidedly against third
party/independent campaigns, now taking money from Republicans
for his own such campaigns. He once said, "For Republicans
to be putting Ralph Nader on television in a paid ad, certainly
might lead your average observer to be cynical."
The Lockstep
Pundits
The Liberal punditry joined
the Democratic Party's attacks on Nader and on anyone so "smug"
as to vote for the candidate of their choice. Eric Alterman wrote
in The Nation, "An honest Nader campaign slogan might have
read, 'Vote your conscience and lose your union --- or your reproductive
freedom," Alterman even called Nader's three million votes
"pathetic" and dismissed the entire campaign as "a
quixotic quest to elect a reactionary Republican to the presidency."
Maybe Alterman's had a change
of heart. Here's what he wrote just prior to Lamont's victory:
"If Connecticut Democratic Primary voters think Lieberman
has been a bad senator and will likely continue to be so, they
should vote him out of office. The fact that he continues
to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea, that creating
a Department of Homeland Security was a good idea, that overruling
Terri Schiavo's family was a good idea, that joining in the Republican
vendetta against Bill Clinton was a good idea, well, that argues
that what you've gotten from the man in the past is likely what
you'll get in the future. People like Broder, the Washington
Post editorial page, Lani Davis and Al Hunt seem to think there's
something unfair in people voting their democratic preferences
in their own primary's party. We'll see."
Indeed, we did see. (How did
Alterman not see, or believe that we did not?)
Slate ran a woeful piece by
Jacob Weisberg yesterday titled "Dead with Ned" likening
Lamont's victory to some weird sort of Democrat Vietnam Syndrome!
"Whether Democrats can avoid playing their Vietnam video
to the end depends on their ability to project military and diplomatic
toughness in place of the elitism and anti-war purity represented
in 2004 by Howard Dean and now by Ned Lamont."
The (neo)Con
Is Up.
The fall of perhaps the most
insufferable of the Democrat neo-cons has to be seen as a good
thing. Remember, Lieberman first was elected himself when he
attacked a true progressive, Sen. Lowell Weicker, who was attacked
by Lieberman as "soft on Castro" and "no friend
of Israel."
Once again, Nader has been
proven correct. All one has to do is witness the collective apoplectic
response to Lamont's victory --- from the Democratic Party and
its captive pundits. As Harry Reid would say, "You could
be a second-grade math student and figure that out."
MICHAEL DONNELLY is a decidedly independent voter.
He has run for office thrice--twice as a Democrat and once as
a Green. He can be reached at pahtoo@aol.com
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