Joementum, that fool; the DINO who gladly submits to Bush's cheek-pinchings; Gore's VP candidate, Loserman; gleeful accepter of endorsements by the corrupt GOP: who is this familiar figure? As it turns out, he has a long history of slimy bastardness related program activities:
Joe Lieberman works hard at coming across as a nice man. But as veteran of the music business with a long memory, I can say from experience Joe Lieberman has never been a nice man, just a cut-throat practitioner of partisan politics -- with a big smile. He's up for re-election this fall and everyone should be aware that he's done more in his time to promote government censorship and destroy freedom of speech for artists than any politician on the national stage today.
[. . .]
Lieberman started his political career in 1970 by going up against a Democratic Party boss Arthur Barbieri and outwitting him in manipulating elderly voters in Crawford Manor, a government-built retirement community, in an election for Connecticut State Senate in which Lieberman was challenging New Haven Democratic incumbent Ed Marcus. Lieberman recognized that parties no longer deliver all the votes and money needed to win elections. You have to build your own machine based on personal loyalty.
[. . .]
But Lieberman was dealt 2 crucial political defeats before he started his real ascendancy. The party bosses bushwhacked him in a 1978 bid to become Lieutenant Governor and he was defeated in a bid for Congress by a Republican 2 years later. In his self-serving book, IN PRAISE OF PUBLIC LIFE, Lieberman delineates the 3 lessons he took away from that race: to rely on daily tracking polls, to never "let your opponent go negative on you without giving at least as good as you get in return," and, most important, to "never, ever let anyone attack you as a 'high-taxing, big-spending liberal.'" That third one's the one he's based the rest of his career in politics on.
In 1982 he ran for Connecticut Attorney General as a law-and-order candidate inching slightly towards the right and glomming on to an aggressively "pro-family" position that has served him very well. He won. For the next 6 years he marketed himself assiduously to Connecticut citizens. In 1988 he challenged progressive Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker -- attacking from the right -- and beat him. Lieberman ran a brutal and viciously negative campaign, mocking Weicker personally and even red-baiting him for being soft on Castro (William Buckley formed a PAC to raise money for Lieberman and later Jack Kemp called him "one of us.") Today Lieberman is far more popular in Connecticut with Republicans and with conservatives than he is with Democrats and with progressives, and in 1988 conservatives gave him his small margin of victory over Weicker. Once in the Senate he went even further right and pro-corporate. "He accumulated the most pro-corporate record of any Senate Democrat -- and the millions of campaign dollars that came with them." He joined the DLC and became their president-- before that, the domain of right-leaning Southern Democrats.
This is when Lieberman, like a snake, shed his old skin entirely, discarding the last vestiges of anything vaguely Democratic, and became what he is today: a right-wing demagogue, a really vile politician who belongs in the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. He made racism quasi-acceptable by framing it as being against unfair affirmative action. An unrelenting homophobe, he joined Jesse Helms' campaign of defamation of gay people and he joined forces with far right extremists like Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed to promote school prayer and voucher programs for religionist schools. And then he got into my own business and my growing hatred for Joe Lieberman turned personal.
The sordid story of Lieberman's key role in the priggishly moralistic censorial group, the PMRC, is then nauseatingly detailed, with this conclusion:
Lieberman destroyed an alliance between young voters and the Democratic Party that had started with John Kennedy's election as he ham-fistedly savaged their culture for his own political ambitions.
In a more recent post, Klein goes into more detail on Lieberman's non-censorship-related activities:
A 2003 piece in the LA Weekly titled "All in all, as Democrat, Lieberman makes a great Republican," takes the bull by the horns when it comes to Lieberman's carefully disguised dog whistle brand of political bigotry:
On gays in the military, Lieberman has enunciated the now-discredited canard that 'homosexual conduct can harm unit cohesion and effectiveness.' (Tell that to the dozens of countries, from England to Israel, that permit openly gay troops in their armed forces.) In fact, Lieberman worked with Georgia's Sam Nunn to fashion the destructive 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, which resulted in escalating expulsions of gays from the military every year after it took effect. Its Catch-22 provisions have directly stimulated a rising wave of violent gay bashing and harassment in the military because victims can't complain without 'telling.'
This is just part of the record that has made Lieberman his party's most notorious theocrat. The Scripture-quoting Lieberman made God-bothering a staple of his 2000 vice-presidential campaign: That August, Holy Joe told a Detroit congregation never to imagine 'that morality can be maintained without religion.' This position was denounced as 'unsettling' by no less than the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith (ADL), which released a letter to him arguing tartly that 'To even suggest that one cannot be a moral person without being a religious person is an affront to many highly ethical citizens.'
Prayer in the schools? Holy Joe lined up with the GOP's religious zealots to push it repeatedly in the Senate. Subsidizing parochial schools at the expense of public education? Holy Joe has sponsored legislation to give parents vouchers to send their kids to parochial schools, draining money from the public schools to which most Americans send their kids. And Lieberman just last year joined with rabid gay basher Rick Santorum -- the Pennsylvania Republican who compared same-sex love to bestiality and incest-- to co-sponsor George Bush's faith-based initiatives, praising Bush's 'leadership' in tearing down the constitutional barrier between church and state.
Right after Gore made the colossal error of naming Lieberman to the Democratic ticket in 2000, Dr. Manning Marable, Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, wrote in the Detroit Free Press:
Throughout his twelve years in the U.S. Senate, Lieberman positioned himself on the extreme conservative wing of the Democratic Party. He chairs the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the 'centrist' group of elected officials (including Clinton and Gore) who have aggressively pushed their party toward more conservative public policy positions. On a wide variety of issues, Lieberman is clearly to the right of both Clinton and Gore. On gay rights, for example, in 1994 Lieberman supported an amendment offered by reactionary Republican Senator Jesse Helms, which cut off federal funds to any school district that used educational material that in any way 'supported homosexuality.'
Lieberman, in a tough primary battle against a progressive Democrat who comes off as anything but the Inside-the-Beltway professional pol that Lieberman has become, probably did take offense to my charge that he's a homophobe; anyone who would still use that "some of my best friend are..." line undoubtedly doesn't think they are homophobic. But I really don't know any gay people who could look at his record as outlined above and conclude anything else.
It's somewhat harder to believe that a US Senator, an ostensibly Democratic one, no less, does not know that he's providing an acceptable frame for racism when he says affirmative action is "un-American."
Let me go back to the very learned and distinguished Dr. Marable for a moment:
Lieberman has a long record of hostility toward affirmative action that even his liberal apologists in the Democratic Party cannot hide. Back in 1995, when Lieberman took over the DLC, he declared, 'You can't defend policies that are based on group preferences as opposed to individual opportunities, which is what America has always been about.' Lieberman embraced California's Proposition 209 in 1996, which outlawed affirmative action programs in that state. When President Clinton, after months of hesitation, finally put forward the formulation that affirmative action programs ought to be 'mended, not ended,' Lieberman led the opposition within the Democratic Party. The DLC's Progressive Policy Institute issued a report criticizing Clinton's position, and called for abolishing it for government hiring and contracting, and making it voluntary in private business.
On issues of higher education, Lieberman has again played a conservative role. He was the only Democrat to vote against liberal historian Sheldon Hackney, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, to become head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He claimed that Hackney was too liberal on campus issues of 'political correctness.' Lieberman then became co-founder of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a five-year-old group that reject ''racial preferences,' opposes 'political correctness,' and defends 'Western civilization.'
(More on the odious ACTA to be found here)
Lieberman and his co-founder, Lynn Cheney, were on a mission. But could he really not realize that these actions played directly into the hands of the bigots of the GOP, giving them cover for their racist agendas? If so, he's the only one.
It didn't fool the NAACP, who gave him a "D" on his voting record, and it didn't fool Jesse Jackson. "We submit to the senator of this state," Jackson roared in 1995 three years before Lieberman's NAACP "D" grade, that we have marched too long, and have died too young. We have been to too many funerals to turn back now! No, Mr. Lieberman, we are moving forward!"
Anyone one who needs further evidence of what could only charitably be referred to as "racial insensitivity" can read the infamous transcript that made many civil rights partisans denounce Lieberman as a racist here (where Lieberman calls affirmative action "un-American.") Former Congressman and NAACP President Kwesi Mfume branded Lieberman as a candidate with "no legitimacy" in the African American community and compared his political capital there to "confederate dollars" after he snubbed an NAACP convention so he could schmooze with Bill O'Reilly on Fox TV.
And Maryland Congressman Albert Wynn, commenting on a subsequent meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus where Lieberman acted the buffoon as he tried to mend fences, said "basically, people were laughing at him."
But the fact that those affiliated with a United States Senator (sorry-- formerly affiliated) became enraged and demanded a retraction about what one lone blogger like myself had to say about them speaks volumes-- Lieberman must indeed be terrified of Ned Lamont. I can well imagine why. Lieberman is still a rabid supporter of an unpopular and disastrous war; his vote helped put a man on the Supreme Court who is now writing love notes to James Dobson, and the man he's running against-- Ned Lamont-- is someone people really believe in, someone I believe in, someone that people are working their butts off for.
So if you would like to help replace a reactionary Bush-lover with a real progressive Democrat, please visit my Act Blue page and be part of the grass roots movement that will add up five, ten and twenty dollars at a time to fight the big money Lieberman will get from all the defense contractors his warmongering has done so much to enrich.
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