On Lieberman, or: The Inadequacy of Emotion

There are reasons why Joesph Lieberman should not have kept his chair of homeland security, just as there are reasons why Lawrence Summers should not be Secretary of the Treasury. Unlike what you might have heard from 90% of the media, those reasons are not entirely due to the fact that both have said some really stupid shit. The better reason is that Summers and Lieberman have not been good at their jobs. In fact, they've been terrible. Summers helped write NAFTA, supported the WTO, and aided fellow smartest guy in the room by not regulating the energy industry (seriously, click on the 'not regulating' link - it's the downing memo of the economy). He also helped McCain advisor Phil Gramm deregulate the banking industry - the same Phil Gramm who recently called America a nation of whiners.

Similarly, Lieberman has been an advocate for Bush's foreign "policy" including supporting the war, the spying, the torture and not using his position to investigate rampant corruption on the part of contractors. There are some people who take on corruption in their own party, and then there are people who manage to facilitate corruption in both parties. I know that the 'epic betrayal' angle plays well, but the point is that he has been as bad at his job as George Bush. The media (Maddow excepted) does not mention this, which is upsetting because when someone does bring it up, Lieberman supporters are almost a loss for words.

So this is change we can believe in. The only thing to do is to keep pushing Lieberman and everyone else to do what he/they haven't done in the past two years: investigate the contractors, the spying, the torture, and then stop the war. And then I'm still contributing to whichever liberal candidate challenges him in 2012.

Incidentally, while I promote a politics of policy over one of emotion, I certainly understand/identify with the visceral hate that so many feel for people like Lieberman (and I don't think 'visceral hate' is too strong). In fact, I think Bob Dylan summed it up best: