Irregular Joe: The Zell Millerization of Joe Lieberman

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IIRC -- Jon Chait was a big Lieberman supporter in his race against Ned Lamont. Better late than never?

Irregular Joe: The Zell Millerization of Joe Lieberman

Watching Joe Lieberman go around the bend over the last couple years is one of the strangest things I've ever seen in politics. Lieberman was always a foreign policy hawk and a capital gains tax cutter, and he generally took enormous pleasure in staying in the right's good graces. But it is also these very qualities--his ideological moderation, his aversion to conflict, his timorous demeanor--that have made his recent apoplexy so weird...

Lieberman is implying that Democrats oppose expanding the military, prevailing in Afghanistan, etc. Actually, they favor all those things. (Obama has proposed adding 92,000 new troops to the military.) Lieberman's statement is literally true--Democrats put a higher priority on Iraq than those other issues-- but misleading. Just because something isn't your "top" foreign policy priority doesn't mean it isn't a high priority.

Yes, Democrats do favor a withdrawal from Iraq. They think the U.S. occupation is not helping to produce a stable government in Baghdad. This is certainly a debatable view, but it just isn't the same thing as lacking confidence in the virtues of American democracy or viscerally opposing the use of force. In Pakistan, the Democratic presidential candidate has advocated military strikes against Al Qaeda, while the GOP candidate has ridiculed such action as impractical. Imagine what Lieberman would say if it was the other way around...

There's hardly any sense in which Lieberman is an independent figure. He's become a cog in the Republican message machine. He may be independent from liberal bloggers, but the conservative equivalent--partisan shouters like Sean Hannity--are his treasured pals. Lieberman even continues to embrace lunatic preacher John Hagee--whose many daft ideas include his belief that the Holocaust fulfilled God's will--even after John McCain repudiated him...