You boys can do what you want. You always do anyway. But I don't think it is a good idea to leave a coward in charge of Homeland Security. Joe Lieberman is a coward. There has been a lot of talk about how he is liberal on social issue but a hawk on security issues. This isn't true. Joe is a liberal. He is just a coward. Just like a number of other liberals, Ron Silver, Scott Simon, Christopher Hitchens, you probably know a few yourself. People who have basically been liberal or progressive all of their lives but who, after 9/11 when feeling personally threatened perhaps for the first time in their lives, decided that all that civil liberty and international law stuff was a bunch of gooey abstraction when weighed against the prospect of flaming Islomofascist death.
I hold no real ill will against these people. Terror is a primarily physiological response. The strength of that response is probably genetically determined. Some people have a particularly strong response to it. It over-powers their critical and moral reasoning. In the past, men would never know how they would respond to this sort of situation until they had 'seen the elephant'. Gung Ho knock 'em dead straight arrows from military backgrounds could fall apart completely while mild mannered clerks turned into heros. It is not predictable and not really controllable. It isn't really a matter of virtue. We should hold no grudges.
But these cowards, people who would put their irrational fear ahead of well thought out solutions and policies, should never be put into positions of authority that have to deal with emergency situations. Joe Lieberman is a coward. He must not be the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.