Lodestar Lieberman

In moments of crisis, Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times yesterday, "I generally recommend looking to see where Joe Lieberman is going. Then head the other way."

Such wrong-way reliability, which has made Lieberman a lodestar for the anxious and confused, delivers two gems today--on the Ft. Hood massacre and health care reform.

As investigators conclude that the shooting spree "was not part of a terrorist plot," he announces that, as Senate Homeland Security chairman, he plans to launch a probe into the motives behind "the worst terrorist attack since 9/11."

In a twofer on Fox News, the Independent Senator from Rupert Murdoch also renews his pledge to launch a filibuster against the public option in health care "put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance."

That would never do for a statesman whose base includes the nation's largest insurance companies, which contribute to his campaigns and employ his constituents.

In moments of uncertainty, I turn back to Joan Didion's assessment in 2004:

"Senator Lieberman, who had come to the nation's attention as the hedge player who had previously seized center stage by managing both to denounce the president [Bill Clinton] for 'disgraceful' and 'immoral' behavior and to vote against his conviction (similarly, he had in 1991 both voiced support for and voted against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas) was not, except to the press, an immediately engaging personality...

"His speech patterns, grounded in the burdens he bore for the rest of us and the personal rewards he had received from God for bearing it, tended to self-congratulation."

But such comfort comes at a price. As convinced as I am by Al Gore's warnings about global warming, it gives me pause to remember that, in Gore's judgment nine years ago, Joe Lieberman was the best person in the country to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

Update: After a meeting with Israel's prime minister this week, President Obama is reported to have quipped to the delegations, "So, we’ve decided that we are going to trade our Lieberman for their Lieberman," referring to the Senator and the hard-line Israeli foreign minister. Sold.

Health Care Horse Trading

In President Obama's house call on the AMA today, the medicine may be coated with a little sugar for doctors that will be a bitter pill for lawyers, setting limits on malpractice suits.

Such horse trading is par for the course in politics, but when the legislation gets into the final stretch, bedside manner won't be able to sooth away the critical issue--a public plan to keep private insurers honest.

Today's Wall Street Journal plays Paul Revere, sounding the alarm that "The 'Public Plan' Would Be the Only Plan," arguing that "It's impossible for private insurers to 'compete' with government." Such despair over free markets is unusual for the Journal and will certainly come as news to FedEx and e-mail providers who never should have challenged the federal postal system.

The air will be filled this week with similar pitches for sticking with old-time elixirs and, for the first time in quite a while, voters have a chance to lean on their Congressional barkers with messages through all channels about their wishes.

One of my own, Joe Lieberman, asserts there is "a real opportunity to do this year what we've been trying to do for years...reform American health care. I think the one thing that will stop that is pressure on the so-called public option. Let's get something done instead of having a debate."

I'll be sending back Dr. Lieberman's snake oil prescription with one of my own, hoping that millions of others, including the Physician-in-Chief, will do the same for Washington's political quacks.

Lieberman Limbo Dance

In his two-step with the former Democrat turned Independent (by his own party's outraged voters) and, most recently, inseparable McCain sidekick and Obama basher, Harry Reid is showing all the resolution and skill that have marked his tenure as Senate Majority Leader.

"Joe Lieberman is not some right-wing nutcase," Reid said today. "Joe Lieberman is one of the most progressive people ever to come from the state of Connecticut."

He is also playing Reid like a cheap violin in the moves over stripping him of chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, as Democrats in and out of the Senate have been calling for the Majority Leader to do.

Apparently Lieberman is refusing to accept a less critical assignment and making eyes at Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a threat to switch allegiances once again.

Reid, who used to be a boxer, seems unable to recognize a feint when he sees one and call the bluff. Back here in Connecticut, voters have revised an old folk saying, "When you have Joe Lieberman for a friend, you don't need an enemy."

Blowing Smoke for Freedom

In a barely disguised attempt to help elect John McCain, a non-profit group called Vets for Freedom is running TV ads to sell voters on the success of the Surge in Iraq.

Starting with $1.5 million worth on national cable as well as in Michigan, Nevada, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado this week, the commercials don't mention candidates' names but end their pitch with the claim, "We changed strategy in Iraq and the surge worked. Now that’s change you can believe in.”

The enormity of this insult to our intelligence--that dying and bleeding and spending billions in an endless war that should never have been waged is "change" underscores one of the 20th century's most striking achievements: the spreading of a Big Lie through mass communications.

Ironically, "Freedom" has always been a useful word to enslave public opinion, starting with that charlatan, Edward L. Bernays, who promoted himself as the master manipulator in "an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

In a triumph of misdirection for the tobacco industry in the 1920s, he sent models to march in a suffrage parade, telling the press they would be lighting "Torches of Freedom," which turned out to be cigarettes to promote the idea of women smoking in public.

Now, just as Bernays hid behind women's suffrage to hawk cancer, Vets for Freedom are using patriotism to sell more death and destruction in Iraq, with tactics crude enough to have sent Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham scurrying off their advisory board six weeks ago.

If he is the model of probity he has always claimed to be, John McCain will follow suit and tell Vets for Freedom to stop blowing smoke on his behalf.

Christmas in July for Lieberman Loathers

"Liberal groups," The Hill reports, "plan to deliver a petition to Capitol Hill next week calling on Democrats to oust Sen. Joe Lieberman from his committee chairmanship in the 111th Congress."

Voters don't have to wait until November to strike a blow for Homeland Security by signing online to start "Joementum" for the housecleaning work a Senate with a substantial Democratic majority will be doing next January.

It's past time for the party to declare its independence from the president of the John McCain and George W. Bush fan clubs.

Lieberman, Leper-to-Be

The former Democrat, then Independent, now Republican sheep dog for John McCain refuses to go gentle in that good night, today barking lies about Barack Obama in the Wall Street Journal.

Obama, Joe Lieberman says, proposes "a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet."

The Democratic nominee-to-be has proposed no such "without preconditions" thing, but that doesn't stop Lieberman from indicting his former party as having gone gutless, in contrast to the good old days of the Cold War when Kennedy was misled by hawks into the Bay of Pigs disaster and then, as Ted Sorensen tells it in his new memoirs, had to use an exquisite combination of brains, toughness and diplomacy to keep the world from blowing up during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But as Gilda Radner used to say, never mind. When Obama is in the Oval Office next January and Democrats have a solid majority in the Senate, Chairman Joe of the Homeland Security Committee may find himself a very lonely former Democrat, former McCain advisor and former Chairman.

Rolling Out War Against Iran

It worked before the 2002 elections, so why not now? George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the lame ducks that roar, are ready. So is John McCain. Hillary Clinton, now as then, is terrified of appearing soft, and even the anti-Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has joined the chorus.

"What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq," he says, as a second aircraft carrier steams into the Persian Gulf and, according to CBS News, the Pentagon orders military commanders to develop new options for attacking Iran.

On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton is warlike: "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel). In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Joe Lieberman, McCain's alter ego, is envisaging "an attempt to hit some of the components of the nuclear program" primarily from the air, with some covert ground assistance. There is now "active discussion" of such plans, he says.

John McCain, now that Lieberman has straightened him out about Sunnis, Shiites and al Qaeda, is ready to roll in the fall campaign against that softie, Barack Obama, who still thinks he can talk down Ahmadinejad from the nuclear brink.

Haven't we seen this movie before?

Proof That God Exists

Amid all the evidence that the world is a random hellhole, there is sometimes a small cosmic joke. Consider today's news about Joe Lieberman.

In August 2006, as Connecticut Democrats were preparing to shed his sanctimonious carcass in their party primary, George W. Bush's favorite toady charged that anti-war voters had sabotaged his web site the day before.

Now, the FBI has reluctantly released results of its investigation of this weighty national security matter to the Stamford Advocate:

"(T)he site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"'The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause,' the memo stated. 'The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site.

"'The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server...Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial-of-service attack.'"

Sounds perfectly consistant with Sen. Joe's modus operandi in urging a US attack on Iran for the past year.

Lieberman Absolves McCain

The US Senate's Resident Moralist has prayed over the alleged sins of John McCain and given him his blessing.

"Here’s a man," the Reverend Joe Lieberman sermonized outside a Connecticut diner this week, "who has devoted his whole life to service to his country. His honor matters a lot to him. His reputation matters a lot to him. And this is a story that basically pukes up 8-year-old rumors, uncorroborated."

In addition, Lieberman offered his personal testimony: "I've been with him on a lot of occasions, traveled all around the world, been at meetings with a lot of women there. And I've never seen him do anything that even approached inappropriate behavior."

Case closed.

Such absolution is impressive from the man who publicly scolded his own President for "sexual misconduct and his deliberate efforts to deceive the American people" in the Monica Lewinsky days.

Now, as an Independent supporting a Republican candidate for president, Lieberman has obviously mellowed. It's surely only coincidence that the text he denounced came from the New York Times, which in 2006 endorsed his opponent in the Connecticut primary, saying "Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass" but "has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates."

It's heartening to see Sen. Lieberman, as Barack Obama might say, reach across the aisle to give moral support to an old friend and after all, as the Times noted back then, "if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum."

The Nation as Head Case

Joe Lieberman and Frank Rich agree about something: America is mentally ill.

"We are a people in clinical depression," Rich writes in his New York Times column today. Sen. Lieberman dissents slightly, saying it is only Democrats who are “politically paranoid.”

Depressed or paranoid, according to the good doctors, we have to pull up our socks and get our heads straight.

But our mood disorder may be more like the "national malaise" Jimmy Carter diagnosed, which lifted as soon as he left the Oval Office.

After seven years of Bush-Cheney syndrome, who wouldn't be more than a little crazed? At Johns Hopkins University the other day, Dr. Lieberman presented “a case study in the distrust and partisan polarization that now poisons our body politic on even the most sensitive issues of national security.”

The Bush-Cheney quack cites "wild conspiracy theories" of left-winger bloggers that the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment was an excuse to attack Iran. After Iraq, he contends, only mad people could suspect that.

More evidence of political derangement, from the other direction, is Rich's equating the Democrats' confirmation of Martin Mukasey as Attorney General with what Pervez Musharraf is doing in Pakistan.

Rich, normally a voice of reason, goes off the rails today asserting that Sens. Schumer and Feinstein were "willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb" in approving Mukasey without his condemnation of waterboarding in a way somehow parallel to Musharraf's power grab in Pakistan.

Metaphors can stretch only so far without getting nutty. The Administration's madness should not become a contagion that keeps critics from making the distinction between the repression of a dictator and a political compromise over starting to undo some of Bush's damage to the US Justice Department.

That way lies madness.

Lieberman: Let's Attack Syria

The good news is we’re winning in Iraq. The bad news: Now we have to attack Syria. On the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, their favorite warrior Joe Lieberman is providing some variety today from all the OpEd writers there who want to bomb Iran.

By some odd chance, the Senator has seen recently declassified American intelligence that “reveals just how much al Qaeda in Iraq is dependent for its survival on the support it receives from the broader, global al Qaeda network, and how most of that support flows into Iraq through one country--Syria.”

The Damascus airport is the target in Sen. Joe’s bomb sites, and he wants to “send a clear and unambiguous message to the Syrian regime, as we did last month to the Iranian regime, that the transit of al Qaeda suicide bombers through Syria on their way to Iraq is completely unacceptable, and it must stop.

“We in the U.S. government should also begin developing a range of options to consider taking against Damascus International, unless the Syrian government takes appropriate action, and soon.”

Lieberman is another of the Bush Administration’s fervent war hawks who was otherwise occupied at an age when he might have fought for his country in Vietnam. He was a law clerk in New Haven, Ct.

The Dating Game

Rep. Christopher Shays, an Iraq war stalwart on the order of his Connecticut colleague, Sen. Joe Lieberman, has just had an epiphany: He wants all American troops out by December 2008.

Meanwhile, they can keep fighting or policing or whatever the hell it is they’re doing until Shays gets re-elected in November 2008. How many will die between now and then?

Bush on Mt. Rushmore

The George W. Bush Afterlife Society will please come to order. First, the invocation from Rabbi Joe Lieberman:

“(H)e will be judged as a president who saw the threat, and in the midst of an unpopular war, he stuck with it...his ratings among the historians will be greater than his ratings in the polls today.”

The Reverend Rush Limbaugh rises to expand on this theme in today’s sermon:

“Long after we’re all dead and gone, when historians who are not yet born begin to write about this era, they’re going to place George Bush in the upper echelon of presidents who had a great vision for America.”

And then the featured speaker, the theologian and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute Michael Novak, who had a few words to say about the honoree:

"Faith is not enough by itself because there are a lot of people who have faith but weak hearts. But his faith is very strong. He seeks guidance, like every other president does, in prayer. And that means trying to be sure he's doing the right thing. And if you've got that set, all the criticism, it doesn't faze you very much. You're answering to God."

Amen. At this point, members will pray for the historians who answered a survey of the History News Network--338 heretics said they believed President Bush is failing, while 77 said he is succeeding. Fifty heathen thought he was the worst president ever, worse than Buchanan. We will pray for enlightment for these lost souls.

The final item on the agenda this evening will be a report from the Committee to Raise Funds for the George W. Bush Sculpture on Mt. Rushmore

Chertoff's Gutsy Forecast

In addition to those color-coded threat levels, the nation now has a new indicator of the imminence of a terrorist attack--the intestinal state of U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff

Briefing the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, Chertoff reported a “gut feeling” that the U.S. would be attacked soon. "Summertime seems to be appealing to them," he said, referring to Al Qaeda.

Chertoff’s stomach and keen insight into terrorist tastes should be enough to compensate for the fact that his Department has been politicized to the point of the lowest morale of all federal agencies with one-quarter of its top positions unfilled.

In this new era of vulnerability, we have to rely on non-traditional intelligence-gathering such as, perhaps, the Homeland Security head watching CNN coverage of the attempted attacks in Britain.

Chertoff is to be commended for his leadership daring but he may never reach the level of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s achievement in re-seating Democrats and Republicans of his Homeland Security Committee in boy-girl dinner party arrangement instead of opposite sides of the table to let citizens see them side by side as they “work together to make our nation more secure.”

In matters of such gravity, little things can be important. Chertoff’s guts and Lieberman’s sensitivity may help keep us safe.

Slight Glitch in Homeland Security

If we are going to be safe from terrorist attacks, Pat Robertson’s law school will have to expand.

According to a Congressional report released today, the Bush Administration “has failed to fill roughly a quarter of the top leadership posts at the Department of Homeland Security, creating a ‘gaping hole’ in the nation's preparedness for a terrorist attack or other threat.”

"One of the continuing problems appears to be the over politicization of the top rank of Department management," the report concludes.

In the Justice Department, as we learned from the case of Monica Goodling, the Administration’s preference has been for graduates of Regent University where professors “integrate biblical principles into areas of the law.”

This year’s student body at Regent was inspired by a lecture on leadership by America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who told them that terrorists “planned to kill us, and they want to do it again.”

But there won't be enough of such highly trained and motivated recruits to fill the Homeland Security void, which may be partly due to the fact that the Department’s employees reported the lowest job satisfaction among 36 federal agencies earlier this year.

But not to worry. The Senate’s Homeland Security Committee passed a bill in March based on the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations that Chairman Joe Lieberman called “a critical step toward building a safer and more secure America for the generations to come."

That nobody is around to implement them is just a minor housekeeping detail.