SALON

Friday, May 23, 2008 4:15 PM UTC

Joe Lieberman, ideological turncoat

The senator's indictment of the Democratic Party is just as dishonest as his failure to discuss his own evolution as an ally of McCain's.

By

Topics: Democratic Party, Iraq war, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, R-Ariz.,

Joe Lieberman, ideological turncoat

Despite his boundless pretensions, Sen. Joe Lieberman is not and has never been a font of foreign policy wisdom. His opinions derive as much from expedience and vanity as any consistent worldview. He will say whatever serves his ambitions at a given moment.

Running against antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont almost two years ago, for instance, he promised Connecticut voters that we were on the cusp of victory in Iraq. “I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops,” he said in October 2006, “and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home.” Within weeks after winning that election, of course, Lieberman was joining with Sen. John McCain, his friend and ideological ally, in support of sending 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq — and bringing exactly none home.

Was he lying when he offered that false but comforting assurance in the heat of a Senate campaign? Was he simply unable to distinguish between reality and his own propaganda? A similar set of questions confronted readers of a Lieberman essay on foreign policy and the Democrats that appeared Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, where we can expect the “independent Democrat” to appear often during the coming months as a turncoat surrogate for McCain — because today he evidently hopes for appointment as a token Democrat in a Republican Cabinet, or even a second nomination as vice president, on the Republican ticket.

Lieberman’s theme in the Journal essay, excerpted from a speech he delivered at an event sponsored by Commentary magazine, the leading neoconservative journal, is easily summarized and utterly unoriginal: Democrats were once patriotic and strong on defense, when Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy led the party, but they have lapsed (again) into weakness and vacillation during the Bush era. And Lieberman pillories Barack Obama for suggesting that he would sit down and talk with the leaders of Iran and other adversarial regimes and for failing to stand up to the party’s overbearing liberal wing.

For someone who once considered himself a history scholar, Lieberman shamelessly falsifies not only the diplomacy of past and current administrations but also, by omission, his own political pedigree. His Journal essay opens with a lament about the condition of the Democratic Party and an idealized glance back at the “principled, internationalist, strong and successful” foreign policy of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman.

“This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in — a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders,” he writes. “It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or … we would fall divided.” (The nuances of Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalin and Kennedy’s missile deal with Khrushchev escape Holy Joe, but then nuance always does.)

“This worldview,” he continues, “began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor — a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and ‘inordinate fear of communism’ represented the real threat to world peace.”

Which Democrats does Lieberman think represented this dubious worldview? Was it George McGovern, decorated veteran of World War II? Was it Jimmy Carter, the former Navy submarine officer who stood against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Or was this ideological changeling in fact Lieberman himself, now projecting his own former views onto the party he has abandoned?

It’s a fair question to anyone who remembers Lieberman’s debut in public life, which he would apparently prefer to forget. During the turmoil over the Vietnam War, a disastrous venture that Lieberman mentions only in passing, he became a leading peace activist in his home state — a political stance that happened to comport nicely with his own ambitions at the time. He was a founding member of the dissident, antiwar Caucus of Connecticut Democrats, which supported the Rev. Joe Duffey’s liberal primary challenge in 1970 against conservative Democratic incumbent Sen. Thomas Dodd, a Vietnam hawk. The young Lieberman, who had escaped the Vietnam draft with student and family deferments between 1961 and 1967, ran and won a seat in the state Senate that same year as a dovish liberal.

Many politicians who once opposed the war in Vietnam (or avoided military service) later adopted neoconservative positions when that became more fashionable. But Lieberman went considerably further in 1970, when he also happened to publish his now-forgotten first book — an excursion into Cold War history titled “The Scorpion and the Tarantula.” Ironically enough, that obscure tome was dug up and excoriated eight years ago on the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page, when the Republican operatives who control that paper’s editorial pages wanted to smear Lieberman, then running for vice president with Al Gore, as weak and unreliable.

Reviewer Ira Stoll, who now edits the right-wing New York Sun, described Lieberman’s book as a “masterpiece of moral equivalency,” which contended that Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was not “a case of the wicked against the virtuous,” but a sad story of rivals caught in an “irreducible dilemma.” Back then Lieberman saw the failures of arms control resulting as much from American and Soviet paranoia as from any ideological conflict. “One of the primary causes of the failure to achieve international atomic control and the concurrent failure to prevent the cold war was the inability of America’s statesmen and people to see through the avalanche of Communist rhetoric and deal with Soviet foreign policy as something shaped by Russia’s unique history and guided by the Russians’ conception of their national interest,” the young Lieberman wrote. “In this more accurate light, Russia’s goals are seen to be more limited and less in conflict with America’s.”

Those sentences sound naive now, even to those of us who believe that neither side in the Cold War represented pure good or evil — and who think that every president, from Kennedy to Reagan, achieved his finest hour by seeking to reduce nuclear proliferation and avoid the catastrophe of war.

The Democrats have struggled over foreign policy since Vietnam, although Lieberman’s indictment of a party that abandoned the president after 9/11 is just as dishonest as his failure to discuss his own evolution. Democrats stood in lock step with Bush when he invaded Afghanistan, and only began to break with him over Iraq, a ruinous war that was based on lies.

As for his complaint against Obama’s willingness to engage with various dictators and despots, let’s not forget that American leaders have done so whenever that suited their objectives — whether secretly, as Ronald Reagan did with Iran, or openly, as George W. Bush has done with Kim Jong Il and Moammar Gadhafi.

But speaking of appeasement, nobody in this debate, including Obama, has ever praised Louis Farrakhan as unctuously as Lieberman did in 2000. Back then, when he was trying to win black votes, he said he looked forward to sitting down with the Nation of Islam leader — and he set no conditions for that meeting.

Maybe John McCain should renounce Lieberman’s support, too.

Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com. To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. More Joe Conason.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 73 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
144 points145 points | 4 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
106 points107 points | comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
36 points37 points | 8 comments
vote
Revenge editing on Wikipedia: The unmasking of a writer who took advantage of online anonymity to pursue vendettas with other writers
12 points13 points | 3 comments
vote
In Montana, dark money brings down a judicial candidate
10 points11 points | 5 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations