My letter to Lieberman after today's vote [updated]
Mon Jan 30, 2006 at 09:40:26 PM PDT
In light of your closure vote today, I will be calling to arrange a meeting with Ned Lamont to see about supporting his primary challenge to you, and urging my fellow members of the Democratic Town Committee in ---- (as well as all the Democrats I work in my capacity as a professor and the author of nine books) to do likewise.
I am deeply disappointed in your failure to stand up to the erosion of our system of checks and balances, the erosion of our privacy rights--indeed the erosion of the Fourth Amendment itself.
I am a conservative Democrat in many ways, a core Clinton supporter who is socially liberal but economically conservative, pro-choice and pro-gun for the same, ultimately libertarian reasons. I am Jewish and religious, and generally a hawkish supporter of Israel. I am a small business owner. I should be one of your core supporters as well, and at one time I was. I am saddened that I no longer can be.
I realize that there are times when pragmatism is required, but there are core moral issues on which there can be no compromise. Our liberty, and its unchecked encroachment by an ever-more-powerful presidency in the face of Senate inactions, is one of those moments. Today was one of those moments.
A "no" vote tomorrow that has no chance of making a difference does not replace the vote today when you could have made a difference. It does not replace your failure of leadership among the group of 14, or among your fellow Senators, at a time when your voice as a conservative Democrat standing up for a core libertarian issue would have carried unique weight.
A "no" vote tomorrow is, in a purely symbolic moment, will not erase the sense of loss I feel because at a key moment when a man I once admired for his moral courage could have stood up for the principles that he once campaigned on, he chose not to.
As a lifelong Democrat, I am ashamed to be represented by a man who will only do the right thing at a moment when he knows it will have no impact.
God help us all, and God help the Republic in these dark days.
Yours,
----
::
It's funny, I make my living as a writer and public speaker, but passionate as I am politically (since my days working the phone lines for the ERA as a seventh-grade boy, while the first rape-crisis center in the county was run out of our kitchen) I've never diaried here before.
I didn't think Lieberman would be the one to drive me to it.
But you see, while I can be deeply cynical, there moral issues, and this is one of them. There are issues of right and wrong, and this is one of them.
It deeply offends me that a man who wears his morality so publicly like Lieberman does; a man who used that morality to scold a president who deeply believed in making the country a better place; a man who wears his religion like a superhero's cape, but seems to dismiss 4,000 years of ingrained Jewish skepticism toward authoritarian rule seems to have no real moral compass when it comes to protecting his constituents.
It doesn't surprise me, but it offends me.
You see, I'm deeply cynical, but also deeply idealistic. I really believe that it's important for each of us to work to make the world a better place. I write and I teach because it's deeply important to me to touch people's lives. I don't always make the right choices, but I grow and I evolve and I learn from my mistakes. I want the world to be a better place for my being in it.
Deep down, I want Senator Lieberman to be one of the good guys. I disagree with him on some pretty fundamental things, but that's okay. There are a lot of deeply moral, good people I fundamentally disagree with. He's done some things I agree with, too.
But today, he had a chance, not to make the world a better place necessarily, but to keep it from becoming a worse one.
Sometimes you have to say, in Luther's words, "Here I stand. I can do no other." Sometimes you have to do something because it's right, no matter what the cost. I respect John Kerry--who became a hero and a senator on the strength of that passionate core belief, only to let himself be talked out of it during the presidential campaign--for rediscovering that center, however belatedly.
As far as Lieberman...well I'm not angry so much as wistful. Wishing he could be something that he isn't anymore, and maybe never was.
There's a wonderful line in a Roger Zelazny story I teach, in which he says, "We need heroes' statues more than we need heroes."
Today, we needed heroes, and instead we got statues.
God help us all, and God help the Republic in these dark days.
Update: Yeah, I'm an idiot and wrote Lampson's name instead of Lamont's in the original version. Not the sort of thing that will convince my editors I do some of my bestwork while sleep-deprived.
Permalink | 7 comments