I'm following up on ThirdPartry's astute blog that pointed out Joe Lieberman's involvement with the Neocon "Committee on the Present Danger" (CPD). As ThirdParty pointed out, Joe Lieberman serves as the committee's honorary co-chairman along with conservative Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyle. SourceWatch reported that the group's managing director and former Reagan advisor Peter Hannaford resigned in June 2004, "one day after the launch after it was reported that Hannaford, while working for his PR firm The Carmen Group, had lobbied on behalf of Austria's Freedom Party, which was headed by right-wing nationalist Joerg Haider."
SourceWatch's calling the virulent anti-Semite Haider a "right-wing nationalist" is just about the nicest thing anyone can say about him. SourceWatch quotes him as having praised the Nazis' "orderly employment policy," and said that he had paid a "solidarity visit" to Saddam Hussein in 2002. And yet, this is the guy who headed Joe Lieberman's organization.
Take a look at the Far Right Neocons that compose the CPD: former CIA director James Woolsey, who has staunchly defended Bush's illegal wiretapping of American citizens, Joseph DiGenova, the Far Right Fox News ideologue, Newt Gingrich (isn't it bad enough that Hillary Clinton is snuggling up to her husband's erstwhile tormentor?), Reagan-era foreign policy ideologue Jeane Kirkpatrick (yes, she's the one who tried to tell us that communists were really bad because they were `totalitarians,' but that the brutal bloodthirsty dictatorships of Central and South America were really AOK because they were just `authoritarian'), Ed Meese, Daniel Pipes, and perhaps the most venomous of the Republican Clinton-Haters- Victoria Toensing.
The voters of Connecticut are shaking their heads in amazement that Joe Lieberman could be so thick with such distasteful characters. This is the Joe Lieberman who told the New Yorker in March 2005 that, "Bottom line, I think Bush has it right," and that "(Howard) Dean was wrong on the war and what he was talking about was bad for the country." As bizarre as are Lieberman's stands on foreign policy, how in the world do journalists take as a given that he is a "centrist Democrat"? Do 99% of the American people have to come out against the war in Iraq and the Neocon strategy of attempting to install pro-American governments in the Middle East through invasion and occupation before the press realizes what an extreme fringe ideology Lieberman espouses?
Ned Lamont speaks for the three-quarters of Democratic voters in Connecticut on the war and at least two-thirds of voters in the entire state. So how is it that that journalists covering the Lamont-Lieberman contest continue to refer to Lamont supporters as "liberals" and Lieberman supporters as "centrists"? Truth is that this is the real Joe Lieberman: a Far Right ideologue who thinks Howard Dean "is bad for the country," and that "Bush has it right."