Obama’s First Big Mistake on the Job–Rescuing Joe Lieberman
By Daniel at 17 November, 2008, 12:40 pm
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By DAVE LINDORFF
November 16, 2008 “Counterpunch” — - - The word is that Barack Obama, in keeping with his promise of a new post-Bush/Cheney era of “civility in government,” is telling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid not to eject the treacherous Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) from the Democratic caucus.
This is a terrible mistake. Joe Lieberman is a wretched example of a man without principle—a back-stabbing slimeball of a politician whose only allegience, apparently, besides to himself, is to Israel.
Now I don’t want anyone to think I’m some rabid anti-semite. My wife and kids are Jewish, we have good friends who are Israeli, and no, I don’t think the Jews run the media or the country. I do, however, think that Joe Lieberman thinks more about what, in his warped and shriveled worldview, is good for Israel, than about what is good for America.
This senator from my childhood state of Connecticut, who back in 2000 ran as a standard-bearer of the Democratic Party as Al Gore’s running mate, since 9-11 has been a warmonger of the first order, even joining the right-wing Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) in trying to pass a resolution in the senate last year which, had it made it through as he originally worded it, would have effectively enabled—even invited–George Bush to attack Iran at will as a part of Bush’s megalomaniacal global “War” on Terror.
It is Lieberman’s obsession with having the US obliterate first Iraq and now Iran, with nukes if need be, that led him to abandon his party and become a leading supporter and apoligist for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and later to become a key endorser of Sen. John “Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” McCain.
Lieberman also signed on enthusiastically to the worst excesses of Bush’s and Cheney’s eight-year-long assault on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and International Law. As head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Lieberman became the leading advocate of fascist policies in the Senate, rivaled only by such ranting Republican proto-fascists as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN). It was Lieberman who at least initially enthusiastically backed Attorney General John Ashcroft’s mad proposal (thankfully never implemented) to establish an Operation TIPS (for Terrorist Information and Prevention Service) program that would have recruited millions of Americans to spy on their neighbors and co-workers, replicating the dreaded Stasi of Communist East Germany. Only after libertarian-minded Republicans like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) came out strongly against the scheme did Lieberman have second thoughts, Initially, in fact, Lieberman had personally, in his role as chair, blocked efforts by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to delete funding for Operation TIPS from a Homeland Security Department funding bill before his committee.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21236.htm
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