The attempts to paint Lamont as a raving lefty are fairly silly; he’s clearly a liberal-leaning centrist. It’s just that next to Lieberman, any liberal-leaning centrist looks like a raving lefty (see below). Not that there’s anything wrong with raving lefties — some of my best friends, etc. — but that’s not even remotely what this race is about, despite media narratives to the contrary.
At any rate, as Lamont said on Franken’s show today, this is a rare instance in which every vote really does matter. I live in CT., and on August 8 I plan to head to my local polling place bright and early to cast my vote for a mainstream centrist who reflects the growing mainstream consensus of the people of Connecticut, and of America — that this president and his war have been complete unmitigated disasters. If you live here, I hope to see you there.
This isn’t about a 60’s style liberal “anti-war movement,” which was a massive youth movement built around the draft coupled with huge social and cultural upheaval. This is just people trying to elect representatives to national office who represent their views. Despite all this blather about “congenial bipartisanship” the Republican Party went so far right they went off the cliff — people are doing the predictable (and responsible) thing and pushing back. Many of them care passionately about their country and are frightened of the direction in which it’s going. They are trying to do something about it. Is that really so scary?
This is just plain old politics, nothing unusual about it except we organize and talk over the internets. America hasn’t heard much from liberals in a while but we’ve been out here the whole time — and our policies have remained popular in spite of all the vilification we’ve endured because of the pathological fear of hippies that permeates the Democratic establishment.
I’ve heard this quite a bit. The Lamont challenge is seen as a possible threat to lose the seat. But I don’t see why that is. The state regularly elects Chris Dodd who is a liberal. It’s a state so blue that the moderate Republicans in the House are in trouble this time and the Republican party has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to even find pedophiles and gambling addicts for the Senate seat. The only scenario by which anyone actually sees a Republican taking the seat is if Lieberman runs as an independent and he and Lamont split the Democratic and Independent vote.
Perhaps that will come to pass, although I sincerely doubt it. But let’s say it does. Why would this be considered Lamont’s fault? He’s not the one who would be launching a third party candidacy when he failed in the primary.
It’s Joe Lieberman who would be playing the Ralph Nader role in this scenario, not Lamont. Everybody needs to keep that straight in their heads after August 8th if Lamont wins. The spoiler is the guy who runs the third party race, not the guy who gets the party nomination.
That’s exactly right. The Republican in this race is a complete joke. The only, and I do mean only, real risk of throwing this seat is if Lieberman loses the primary and runs as an independent.
Lieberman’s years in public life have been a steady drumbeat of disappointment for Connecticut Democrats, a liberal lot who do not share his often conservative views. End-of-life issues are just one example. In 1992, the state’s Democratic voters picked Jerry Brown over Bill Clinton in the presidential primary. Lieberman, meanwhile, spent the 1990s joining cultural conservative Bill Bennett in a kind of Sherman’s March through American culture, handing out Silver Sewer awards for sex and violence and denouncing such pornographic abominations as “Married … With Children.”
Tag teaming with Bennett was one of the senator’s early experiments in what he calls “bipartisanship,” which often entails adopting Republican positions without leveraging any concession from the other side. Tell me how Bill Bennett moved toward the middle to accommodate Joe Lieberman. Pretty much the way Bush and Cheney moved to the center to meet Democrats on Iraq. Not at all.
… Long before there were those TV love fests with Fox’s Sean Hannity that so enrage lefty bloggers there were earlier love fests with none other than Pat Robertson. On the apocalyptic evangelist’s “700 Club,” Lieberman complained about moral relativism, said there was too little religion in public life, and said he was pleased that people of faith were taking their principles into the political arena. In 2003, Connecticut political writer Paul Bass chronicled the scramble by the senator’s staff to scrub his image from a fundraising infomercial (also starring Robertson and Jerry Falwell) for a conservative religious group with which he had been involved. His 2004 campaign for the presidential nomination was so pitched toward the conservative, moralistic, Southern elements of the party that I jokingly suggested the slogan: “He may be a Jew, but he’s a better Christian than you are.”
… Covering Lieberman is a good way to understand how misleading a voting record can be. (Are you listening, Courant editorial board?) Most members of Congress vote with their parties the preponderance of the time. There are other questions to ask. Did he vote differently on a much-more-important earlier amendment or cloture motion? Did he wait until it was clear his vote wouldn’t hurt the other side? Are his public pronouncements strangely different from his votes?
Consider Lieberman’s behavior during the confirmation of Clarence Thomas 15 years ago, well documented in this article from the political newsletter Counterpunch. Lieberman spoke avidly on behalf of Thomas and disdainfully about Democratic colleagues whose opposition was, he thought, too political. He was pretty much the last senator to commit to a nay vote, and only when his vote didn’t matter.
In 1999 I was still president of Reprise when a quartet of college faves of mine, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunited to record, release and tour behind LOOKING FORWARD. So long ago… remember what it was like in the world before George Bush? The new CSN&Y tour, Freedom of Speech Your ‘06, is very different from the LOOKING FORWARD Tour.
Ben Werner of the Orange County Register doesn’t want to mince words. “The quartet of 60-somethings has rallied around a decidedly strident work, Young’s LIVING WITH WAR, easily the most bluntly outspoken response to the president and the Iraq war yet recorded. Slammed out in a six-day rage, the disc’s nine straightforward anthems (and choir rendition of “America the Beautiful”) scream for CS&N’s harmonies and willingness to take a similar stand… Trust me, these won’t be your grandfather’s CSN&Y shows. Yeah, across 30-plus songs in two sets, they typically toss in ‘Our House’ and ‘Helplessly Hoping’ to temper the attack. But with the majority of Young’s fed-up firebombs alternating with Vietnam-era staples like ‘Ohio’ and ‘Chicago’ and ‘For What It’s Worth,’ this throwback to change-the-world rock will surely be the most protest-heavy series of shows since 2004’s Vote for Change.
More here, along with a nine-minute documentary about the current tour.
I’m going to do these things for a few weeks, but I’m not sure how long they’ll last after that. Some publishers are more cooperative than others, and since I don’t exactly get a lot out of this other than the ability to highlight work I’m interested in, I’m not really interested in fighting battles with them. Sample aggravation: I wanted to devote a week to John Dean’s new book, but his publicist (who sent me a review copy of the book a few weeks back) says that since the release date was a whole three weeks ago, they’re not interested. Having just been on book tour myself, I’m astonished that a publicist would blow off a site with an average of 15,000 readers a day (equivalent advertising on this site would cost a lot more than five free books), but in an odd way it’s reassuring — the various indignities I have suffered over the years at the hands of clue-deprived publicists were nothing personal, this is just apparently how the publishing industry works.
Fortunately, some people do understand that every little bit helps, like Paul Reickhoff (who gave me the idea in the first place), and Bill Bentley at Lookout Management, who was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, and provided the CDs for this week’s giveaway. (My thanks go out to both.)
I have a few more fun things lined up for the next few weeks, but after that, it’s really up to the publicists. I’m not going to be in the position of begging them to let me do them a favor …
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
“We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.”
So there you have it, straight from the world’s most appealing family: we invaded Iraq for the oil, but we may have made a mistake by not killing millions when we got there.
BONUS: Decter’s daughter is married to Elliot Abrams, making him John Podhoretz’s brother-in-law. Abrams, now on the National Security Council, pleaded guilty to misleading Congress over Iran-Contra. He also tried to cover-up the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, in which 900 men, women and children were slaughtered.
I imagine big family occasions with this merry clan are really something.
“Has the caterer gotten here yet?”
“No. Let’s drop napalm on his town and then move house to house, shooting any survivors.”
“Sounds good! What about the band? Are they going to play standards, or more contemporary stuff?”
“I don’t know. Let’s pay a proxy army to rape and murder all the women and then go on a bloody rampage, killing thousands more.”
Via Greenwald, here’s what unhinged loonie leftist Howard Dean was saying in February of 2003:
To this day, the President has not made a case that war against Iraq, now, is necessary to defend American territory, our citizens, our allies, or our essential interests.
The Administration has not explained how a lasting peace, and lasting security, will be achieved in Iraq once Saddam Hussein is toppled.
I, for one, am not ready to abandon the search for better answers.
As a doctor, I was trained to treat illness, and to examine a variety of options before deciding which to prescribe. I worried about side effects and took the time to see what else might work before proceeding to high-risk measures. . . .
We have been told over and over again what the risks will be if we do not go to war.
We have been told little about what the risks will be if we do go to war.
If we go to war, I certainly hope the Administration’s assumptions are realized, and the conflict is swift, successful and clean. I certainly hope our armed forces will be welcomed like heroes and liberators in the streets of Baghdad. I certainly hope Iraq emerges from the war stable, united and democratic. I certainly hope terrorists around the world conclude it is a mistake to defy America and cease, thereafter, to be terrorists.
It is possible, however, that events could go differently, and that the Iraqi Republican Guard will not sit out in the desert where they can be destroyed easily from the air.
It is possible that Iraq will try to force our troops to fight house to house in the middle of cities - on its turf, not ours - where precision-guided missiles are of little use. . . .
There are other risks. Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.
Iran and Turkey each have interests in Iraq they will be tempted to protect with or without our approval. . . .
Some people simply brush aside these concerns, saying there were also a lot of dire predictions before the first Gulf War, and that those didn’t come true.
We have learned through experience to have confidence in our armed forces - and that confidence is very well deserved.
But if you talk to military leaders, they will tell you there is a big difference between pushing back the Iraqi armed forces in Kuwait and trying to defeat them on their home ground.
There are limits to what even our military can do. Technology is not the solution to every problem.
And here’s a description of what the very serious thinker Paul Wolfowitz was saying at the same moment in time:
In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said.
If you don’t like obscenity, you don’t like the truth. If you don’t like the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. -Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
George Bush had better be fucking right.
That’s how I began my journal on April 3, 2003. Writing in pencil on an Army-issue notebook with mint green pages, leaning in on deliberate, hard letters, I underlined “better” and penciled over the words again and again until they wore through the tactically-colored paper.
On March 19, just two weeks earlier, the US had launched the first air strike of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Troops on the ground had invaded Iraq the next day. And now I was off to war for reasons that I feared were bullshit.
I reclined in the first-class section of a civilian 747 bound for Kuwait with an M-16 wedged between my legs and my gut firmly stuffed with all the Krispy Kreme doughnuts I could scarf down in twenty minutes, courtesy of the old Red Cross ladies who saw us off at Hunter Army Airfield, Fort Stewart, Georgia. It seemed a bad omen that the Red Cross was the last organization to see us off to war. The Red Cross sends emergency notifications to deployed soldiers when something urgent happens back home-like when someone is in a car accident or a grandmother dies. Everyone shuddered whenever word came that a Red Cross notification was on the way. It was the soldiers’ equivalent of the knock at the door.
Sitting in a cracked faux-leather seat with In Flight Magazine’s glossy pictures of Hawaii poking out the seat pocket in front of me, I considered the absurdity of the situation.
“Gentlemen, please ensure your seatbacks are in the upright position,” an older woman’s voice crackled over the PA system.
What? We were geared to the teeth with the essentials of combat. Bullets, grenades, rifles, knives, rucksacks, scowls, Copenhagen, cigarettes, hatred, the Penthouse March 2003 edition with Lilly Ann on the cover-the whole Army deal. I was cranked up and ready to run through hell, already bracing myself for incoming explosions, and going over indoctrinated checklists in my mind. And I had to worry about the seatback being upright?
I was going to war, with the greatest military force the world had ever seen, on a jet snagged from a recently bankrupted airline. I wondered if we’d get the little bag of peanuts.
I slid my CD headphones over my ears. I tried to shut out the endless cacophony of yelling, farting, gear rattling, spitting and snoring with headphones streaming System of a Down, Linkin Park and Jay Z. The emotional oasis of a temporary musical vacation helped all of us forget we were constantly surrounded by thirty-eight other men.
Funny. These headphones were just like every piece of equipment issued to my platoon: old and held together with nothing but hope and some twenty-mile-an-hour tape (green Army duct tape). I hoped these suckers wouldn’t break before we got there. I needed my music to keep me sane-to buffer me from the men, if only for a song or two. Where the hell do you get new headphones in Iraq?
My men and I were National Guardsmen, attached to First Brigade, Third Infantry Division, also known as 3ID. * Shouldered with the task of taking over a foreign country, yet disallowed from smoking in the lavatories of the plane. Since the days of Troy, soldiers have pushed the limits of what little they are allowed to do-especially in pursuit of a vice. The Army has a saying: “Ask for forgiveness, not for permission.” I was pretty sure that on this seventeen-hour flight one of the many chain-smokers in Third Platoon would test the FAA to see if it would really fine a soldier $1,000 for smoking a cigarette in a latrine on the way to die in Iraq. Sure it would be ironic, but not outside the realm of possibility.
I looked across the dimly-lit aisle at one of my SAW gunners. I’ll call him “Gunner.” Think the most Johnny-All-American-Homecoming-King kid you ever met. With a white-blond flat-top, blue eyes, perfect teeth, a chiseled jaw and about 5% body fat, Gunner was straight out of a recruiting commercial. Perfect uniform, immaculate weapon, and always followed orders without being told twice. He didn’t bitch, and maintained perfect military bearing.
Gunner was big on two things: God, and his beloved girlfriend. On the left side of his stomach, just above his kidney, was a meticulously scripted tattoo in flowing cursive letters: “Andrea.” He’d proposed to her just weeks before we left. He probably spent everything he had and then some to buy her the ring.
I thought of that tattoo as I glanced at him. It was buried beneath his BDU top now, but it stuck in my head. A lot of guys in the Army have tattoos around the same area-but a few inches higher, and in a much different design. Soldiers call them meat tags. A meat tag is a copy of the Army dog tag you wear around you neck, tattooed on your torso, just below your armpit. A meat tag isn’t just a hard-core status symbol. It’s a way to identify a body if the torso is all that remains after it’s blown apart. Name, social security number and religious preference (if any). Call it thinking ahead. Prep for combat. Another safety measure, like an extra pair of socks.
If you want to be in the running for a copy of Chasing Ghosts, be sure to send an email before tomorrow night. And keep watching this space — the weekly contest is going to be a regular feature for awhile, and I’ve got some great stuff lined up for the next few weeks.
· On Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), accusing him in a hearing of not comprehending the devastation: “For that little twerp to claim I didn’t understand death and suffering — he can just bite me, for all I care.”
· On President Bush saying the levee breaches were unexpected: “He doesn’t have an incredible command of the English language.”
· On DHS boss Michael Chertoff ordering him out of the field: “I am so mad at myself for not saying ’screw you.’ ”
· On Bush calling him “Brownie”: “It’s typical of the president. He’s a cheerleader . . . How many people in the world do you think have ever called me Brownie? . . . When he used that nickname, a lot of people in the media went, Is he an insider?”
· On his much-mocked prior job with the International Arabian Horse Association: “Dealing with horses’ asses taught me how to deal with the federal government.”
