From
Time Magazine Online:
DLC Senior Fellow Marshall Wittmann, who was wearing a Lieberman pin attached to his DLC name tag at the Denver meeting, warned that if Lieberman -- the Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee -- falls victim to the party's angry, netroots-driven forces, "it will likely have the result of driving the Democratic presidential primaries to the left in 2008." In that case, he and others worry, the kind of middle-class-oriented ideas that were being offered by the DLC as its "American Dream Initiative" would likely get lost in the larger political currents.
As part of the netroots revolution, I guarantee you that I'm not angry. If anger had been my primary reaction to everything with which I disagreed, I would not have been able to maintain a
running record of my common-sense thoughts for over three years. I am, however, very interested in having a healthy democracy in a nation where the Constitution is protected and respected by all - especially our elected leaders. When Senator Lieberman said, and I
quote...
"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."
....I used the facts at hand to weigh the impact of Senator Lieberman's statement against the realities that we face today as American citizens. As an intelligent patriot, I owe it to my fellow Americans to examine the words carefully and extract the force they imply upon our democratic rights.
Our rights are imaginary ideals. They are made meaningful enforceable, and lasting -- only by the work of ordinary citizens who make the laws and keep the order within our sovereign democratic state.
What I heard in Senator Lieberman's words was that he no longer trusted the American people, including war-seasoned men like John Murtha, Paul Pillar, Anthony Zinni, Gregory Newbold, Eric Shinseki, Paul Eaton, William Odom, and John Batiste. Each man has had reasonable cause to doubt and criticize the choices and decisions made, the competence, the accuracy, and/or the actions of President George W. Bush and his administration on this new kind of war with no end in sight.
In essence, Senator Lieberman seems to be afraid that any meaningful and common sense critique of Mr. Bush's policies will cause America to fall apart. How weak a nation we would be if that were true.
I would only begin to doubt the strength of America if her people were effectively silenced by intimidation. If America could fall apart, it could only be from within, and I never want to see that happen. I'm not angry in the least. My concern, as a responsible citizen of the United States, is not only about what is happening overseas, but by what is happening in the chambers of each branch of the American government.
The netroots is not some overzealous unit that trumpets an inelastic, absolute sense of individual liberties that denies other Americans the right of self defense. We are individuals who, like our leaders, don't know with certainty where our enemies hide in this war on terror. We obviously have not yet found the means to root out the causes of terrorism. In fact, the problem of terrorism seems to have been exacerbated by our attempts to fight against it these past four years. The well-rehearsed war plans of yesterday are not well-suited to today's shifting battlefields of terror.
I'd like to tell Marshall Wittman that anger is not an emotion that interferes with my serious contemplation of Senator Lieberman's words. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post staff writer Tom Ricks recently wrote a book called "Fiasco." In a recent online chat, he did not place blame on the President alone, although he recognized and acknowledged key mistakes his administration has made. He included Congress in his list of errant American leadership:
I'd say the book argues that you don't get a mess as big as Iraq from the failings of one or two men, such as President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Rather, I think there was a systemic failure. Sure, the Bush Administration made mistakes, and failed especially to recognized the nature of the conflict in which it was engaged (which as Clausewitz says, is the key task of the supreme leader).
But I would would say the military establishment bears much of the blame, especially for the flawed occupation. In addition, the media and the intelligence community made mistakes.
Finally, I think that Congress was asleep at the wheel. That's crucial. Congressional hearings provide oversight and accountability and (when done well) pump information into the American system. In other wars, you had hawks and doves. In this war you had the silence of the lambs.
"The lambs" have no moral support from Senator Lieberman, based on his own words, and this is the source of my diminishment of trust in his judgement - not only in matters of national security, but for the American people and the spirit of the 1776 Revolution that was set down in new law over two centuries ago by our Founding Fathers. Asking Americans to trust when they have every reason to question the current American course opens and bleeds the artery of the checks and balances that harbor the lifeblood of the Spirit of '76. Bottom line, I think it's un-American to tell us to stop questioning the President in the public square.
In the words of Robert McClure, former dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, we are fighting this "war on terror"..
...by trial and error..hoping to muster enough good sense and good luck to muddle through today's uncertainties..and then to do the same tomorrow..and the day after tomorrow...and on and on until some unknown exhausting endpoint. But without a formal beginning, without specified state belligerents named in a congressional declaration, this new kind of war poses the added danger of becoming open-ended: a war without boundaries; a war without end..."
In a war with no foreseen end, we Americans understand that we relinquish our critical questions at the cost of our liberty.
Does that sound angry to you?