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Sore losers
by Joe Conason
The overthrow of Joe Lieberman has intensified
the anxieties of the Republican establishment
and their friends in Washington's professional
chattering class. This week they were full of
furious insults, dire predictions and brazen
lies about the political uprising of those well-heeled
peasants in Connecticut who dared to ignore the
conventional wisdom and did what they felt
was best for country and party.
Not surprisingly, the most vicious and partisan
attacks emanate from those same statesmen
and intellectuals whose propensity for fear-mongering
and falsifying first led us into the Iraq
quagmire. They hate being held to account for
the catastrophe they authored, which is why
they again stoop to questioning the patriotism
of their critics -- in this instance, the ordinary
voters who went to the polls to register their
dissent from George W. Bush's war.
So Vice President Dick Cheney claims that those
Connecticut voters -- many of whom lost
neighbors and friends on 9/11 -- encouraged "the
al-Qaida types" by supposedly endorsing
the "notion that somehow we can retreat behind
our oceans and not be actively engaged in
this conflict and be safe here at home." RNC
chairman Ken Mehlman accuses "national
Democrat leaders" of "defeatism, isolationism,
and blaming America first." And Bill Kristol
charges that those voters didn't really dump
Lieberman because of his position on the war,
but because "he's unashamedly pro-American."
(Either those leafy suburbs are crawling
with subversives, or Kristol is a nasty little
McCarthyite.)
Such slurs and slanders were only to be expected
from the ruffled chicken hawks, squawking
over the potential loss of their favorite Democratic
enabler and scared of the electorate's
growing wrath. Equally predictable was the reaction
of pundits and analysts, shocked by the
diminishing impact of their bad advice and incoherent
ideas. The great and the good of the
punditocracy told the voters to shun Ned Lamont
and to shut up about the war, and were
duly ignored. Now those naughty children will
pay the price, or so we are told.
In Time magazine, Mike Allen regurgitates the
Republican line on Lieberman's defeat:
"The Democrats' rejection of a sensible, moralistic
centrist has handed the GOP a weapon
that could have vast ramifications for both the
midterm elections of '06 and the big dance
of '08." A Democratic primary in Connecticut
is quite unlikely to augur "vast ramifications"
for anything that happens two years hence, but
never mind. What is most astonishing about
Allen's analysis is that he ignores the stunning
verdict on Lieberman delivered by his own
colleagues, which showed exactly why he was anything
but "sensible" on the issue of the war.
It was Michael Ware, Time's Baghdad bureau chief,
who provided the single most pungent
assessment of the "centrist" senator last November.
In an interview broadcast on Air America's
morning show, the reporter recalled his puzzling
encounter with the sunny, silly optimist so
beloved by the White House:
"I and some other journalists had lunch with Senator
Joe Lieberman the other day and we
listened to him talking about Iraq. Either Senator
Lieberman is so divorced from reality that
he's completely lost the plot, or he knows he's
spinning a line. Because one of my colleagues
turned to me in the middle of this lunch and
said he's not talking about any country I've ever
been to and yet he was talking about Iraq, the
very country where we were sitting."
In other words, Lieberman lacked credibility with
voters on the most critical issue of the moment.
He may pretend now to be a "critic" of the White
House, but that isn't why Karl Rove has been
calling every day since the primary to offer
his support and best wishes.
Such basic facts and clear perceptions present
no intellectual obstacle to the shrewd purveyors
of Beltway spin. Consider Jacob Weisberg, the
editor of Slate, who published a breathtakingly
dishonest attack on Lamont's supporters:
"The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman
insurgents go far beyond simply
opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war,
his dishonest argumentation for it, and his
incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear
not to take the wider, global battle against
Islamic fanaticism seriously."
He provides no evidence for that bit of Rovian
smear, because there is none. The same liberal
bloggers who backed Lamont are helping former
Navy secretary Jim Webb in the Virginia
Senate race and Democratic veterans in several
congressional races. It would be amusing to
hear the Slate editor tell them they aren't tough
enough.
As one of the "liberal hawks" who helped to sell
the Iraq war, Weisberg has since changed
his mind, but he cannot tolerate the public repudiation
of his terrible mistake.
"Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner
we find a way to withdraw, the better for us
and for the Iraqis," Weisberg says. But if everyone
agreed about the need to get out as soon
as possible, the voters wouldn't be infuriated
with Bush -- and would not need to express that
sentiment by dumping Lieberman.
More than two years ago, Weisberg began to express
qualms about the war that he and his
writers had promoted so insouciantly. Sooner
than some who now share his doubts, he
admitted that things weren't working out so well.
In a January 2004 symposium published
on Slate, he explained why he was worried. His
reasons included "the huge and growing
cost of the invasion and occupation: in American
lives (we're about to hit 500 dead and
several thousand more have been injured); in
money (more than $160 billion in borrowed
funds); and in terms of lost opportunity (we
might have found Osama Bin Laden by now
if we'd committed some of those resources to
Afghanistan). Most significant are the least
tangible costs: increased hatred for the United
States, which both fosters future terrorism
and undermines the international support we will
need to fight terrorism effectively for
many years to come."
Since then we have suffered nearly five times
as many dead and wounded, and anticipate
six times as much in financial expense. The opportunity
costs and the diplomatic damage
are obvious in Afghanistan, in Israel and Palestine,
and in the international struggle against
Islamic extremism. The Democratic voters of Connecticut
have delivered a verdict on the
debacle made in Washington -- and they have no
reason to heed the scolding of those
who have been wrong all along.