One of the front-paged diaries this morning,
CT-Sen: It's just this stupid war is well-written and well-referenced, but it is wrong.
I actually DO use "the stupid war" as a single-issue litmus test for deciding which candidates I will or will not support, but I do not see that as being the case for most Democrats or Kossacks.
If "the stupid war" were THE issue, wouldn't there also be knives out for Clinton, Landrieu, Nelson (both of them), Feinstein, Dodd, Biden, Carper, Bayh, Reid, Schumer, and any other Democrat who voted for the Iraq War resolution?
So, what IS the reason for the concerted effort to defeat Lieberman?
It's not his "support for the stupid war," it's his cheerleading for the war in Iraq even before it began, his support for Bush, and his attacks on other Americans who question or are critical of the war.
In 2002,
Lieberman was one of 10 lawmakers who signed a letter urging Bush to target Iraq next.
In November 2005, when public support had clearly turned against the war in Iraq and political support was beginning to shift, Lieberman penned an Op-ed to the Wall Street Journal in which he said, inter alia:
I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq ...Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.
There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before...
... I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November's elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead...What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory...
Not one to rest on his lapdog laurels, Lieberman went on a few weeks later at a December 2005 press conference to say:
History will judge us harshly if we do not stretch across the divide of distrust to join together to complete our mission successfully in Iraq," Lieberman said. "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.
Video link to this press conference can be viewed
here courtesy of Crooks & Liars.
Lieberman's self-righteous indignation and pomposity wasn't the result of 9/11. Back in 1995, Lieberman and Lynne Cheney (Yes, big Dick's wife) formed a group called the American Council of Trustees & Alumni whose goal was to police the ranks of academia and generate blacklists of faculty who offended their notions of proper instruction. The group began "Campus Watch" programs, i.e. witchhunts, led by the likes of Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz. Following 9/11, the ACTA issued a report, which The Nation described as:
"Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." The forty-three-page document purports to advocate the preservation of academic freedom and dissent while being all about suppressing both when the views expressed conflict with blind support for US foreign policy...
Harold Meyerson wrote an excellent op-ed in the Washington Post in July 2006 where he laid out Lieberman's problems in the primary:
My colleagues also finger those crazy lefty bloggers as the culprits behind the drive to purge Lieberman from Democratic ranks...
...I don't blog; I columnize. But count me with the bloggers on this one. No great mystery enshrouds the challenge to Lieberman, nor is the campaign of his challenger, Ned Lamont, a jihad of crazed nit-pickers. Lieberman has simply and rightly been caught up in the fundamental dynamics of Politics 2006, in which Democrats are doing their damnedest to unseat all the president's enablers in this year's elections. As well, Lieberman's broader politics are at odds with those of his fellow Northeastern Democrats. He is not being opposed because he doesn't reflect the views of his Democratic constituents 100 percent of the time. He is being opposed because he leads causes many of them find repugnant...
...Lieberman's ultimate problem isn't fanatical bloggers, any more than Lyndon Johnson's was crazy, antiwar Democrats. His problem is that Bush, and the war that both he and Bush have championed, is speeding the ongoing realignment of the Northeast.
I, for one, hope that the war poodle is defeated on August 8.