Dear Senator Lieberman,
In 1988 I was a college student in Connecticut and I voted for you in your race against Lowell Weicker. My motivation for voting for you was primarily to keep the Senate in the hands of the Democrats as a check on President Reagan's power. Although Lowell Weicker struck me as a decent man, I could not see how his ability to represent my interests would jib with the politics that the Republican party had adopted.
In 1994, I again happened to be living in Connecticut, albeit briefly, and again voted for you to represent my interests on Capitol Hill. The 1994 election was a down year for Democrats, but you managed to keep your seat.
In 2000, I voted for you twice, once for VP and a second time for your position as Connecticut's Senator.
So - those are my bona fides. I've voted for you three times and feel that it's reasonable for me to criticize your recent behavior. For the past five years you have been a consistent cheerleader for the Bush efforts. You have supported a war in Iraq for reasons that have yet to be explained to the public in any satisfactory manner. I have slowly come to the conclusion that you are part of the group of people who wish to see American impose its will on the Middle East by repeated military interventions.
Still, I had hoped that you would say something against the President when the evidence of the abuses at Abu Ghraib was revealed. After all, you were touted in the media as a man of conscience, an image you had cultivated when you stood up on the Senate floor and criticized President Clinton for his marital infidelity. Surely, I thought, although adultery is a horrible sin, torture and abuse of prisoners are equally horrible, and we can count on the conscience of Senator Lieberman to speak up here. But you never said anything. You never demanded that conditions there improve. Indeed, you never questioned the reason for the wholesale "detention" of thousands of Iraqis on the flimsiest of evidence, nor the transfer of people captured on the battlefields of Iraq and Afganistan to indefinite, lawless detention in Cuba.
In recent months, you have tried to run away from this legacy of Bush enabling. Indeed, although you had said on December 6, 2005 [http://lieberman.senate.gov/...]
It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril.
You have more recently indicated your criticism of the President, including a call for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. You have protested that you really are serving the interests of the Democrats who elected you.
Yesterday we had a moment of truth, and the truth was there to behold. You did not represent my interests, Senator, and you voted contrary to my desires. Not only did you do so, you empowered a power-seeking President who has been openly flouting the law for years, and has been violating the Constitution. What has been the Bush administration's response to the recent judicial decisions attempting to limit his power? The administration has ignored them and now has pushed through a new bill that will declare all of the abuses at Guantanamo to be legal.
Where is your outrage at the torture perpetrated in our name? Very recently you and Senator McCain made a public campaign out of holding Bush accountable for his treatment of people detained. How does it hold Bush accountable to let Bush be the person defining torture?
Your performance yesterday was disgraceful, Senator. You did not represent the people of Connecticut, nor the Democrats who helped you achieve your lofty position. As far as I'm concerned, you've worn out your welcome. You do not represent Democratic values or, indeed, democratic values. In your vision of America, the President should be empowered to declare any person an "enemy combatant", have this person detained indefinitely, and
"aggressively interrogated" (i.e. tortured). You have also refused to oppose the President on his claim that he has a Constitutional right to wiretap any conversation he wishes to, as long as he believes that it's in the interests of the United States. Since he believes Republican control of the government is vital to the defense of the United States, doesn't it logically follow that the President could well be wiretapping his political enemies?
On these key issues facing the United States today, where the President has broken the law and flown in the tradition of the moral values that the nation was founded on, your voice has been conspicuously absent.
Shame on you.