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Friday, January 12, 2007

The 50% of Connecticut voters who sent Joe Lieberman back to Washington should be ashamed of themselves
Posted by Jill | 6:52 AM
As if it weren't bad enough that Lieberman is supporting George W. Bush sending another 20,000 young Americans to their deaths, now he's giving his best bud a free pass on the latter's failures on our own soil. Yes, thanks to Holy Joe Lieberman, George "Heckuva Job Brownie" Bush will face no investigation about how his administration failed the people of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina:

Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

Lieberman’s reversal underscores the new role that he is seeking to play in the Senate as the leading apostle of bipartisanship, especially on national-security issues. On Wednesday night, Bush conspicuously cited Lieberman’s advice as being the inspiration for creating a new “bipartisan working group” on Capitol Hill that he said will “help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror.”

But the decision by Lieberman, the new chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to back away from the committee's Katrina probe is already dismaying public-interest groups and others who hoped the Democratic victory in November would lead to more aggressive investigations of one of the White House’s most spectacular foul-ups.

Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush.

Asserting that there were “too many important questions that cannot be answered,” Lieberman and other committee Democrats complained in a statement last year that the panel “did not receive information or documents showing what actually was going on in the White House.”

[snip]

But now that he chairs the homeland panel—and is in a position to subpoena the records—Lieberman has decided not to pursue the material, according to Leslie Phillips, the senator’s chief committee spokeswoman. “The senator now intends to focus his attention on the future security of the American people and other matters and does not expect to revisit the White House’s role in Katrina,” she told NEWSWEEK.


This is absolutely breathtaking. Lieberman exploited Bush's Katrina failures during the election campaign to position himself as a candidate of "change" -- and the minute he gets sent back to Washington, he's got Bush's back on everything.

This notion of "Let's not dwell in the past", which has been used so successfully by this Administration to avoid any accountability for its many, myriad, spectacular fuckups, which have come one right after another for the past six years, has to stop. When Bill Clinton was president, "accountability" was the watchword on every Republican's lips -- and Joe Lieberman's. Clinton had to be held accountable for a land deal gone bad. He had to be held accountable for the Paula Jones "incident." He had to be held accountable for the Lewinsky affair. He had to be held accountable for the Somalia fiasco (more about BUSH's Somalia fiasco in another post). But THIS guy, who allowed an American city to disappear, who allowed the man who masterminded the attacks on America to go free, who has gutted the U.S. Constitution, who invaded a country that did nothing to us -- THIS GUY is somehow entitled to a free pass?

It's ironic that one of the biggest moral scolds in the Senate is refusing to show this president that actions have consequences, and it says something hideous about Joe Lieberman as a man and as a leader that a president's sexual behavior, however tawdry, immoral, and repulsive it may have been, earned his outrage; but when a sitting president allows Americans to die and an American city to disappear, then bestows government largesse on his campaign contributors for "reconstruction", with little to no oversight, that doesn't trigger Lieberman's sense of right and wrong.

Here is what he said about Bill Clinton during the impeachment hearing:

I have been deeply disappointed and angered by this President's conduct--that which is covered in the Articles, and the more personal misbehavior that is not--and like all of us here, I have struggled uncomfortably for more than a year with how to respond to it. President Clinton engaged in an extramarital sexual relationship with a young White House employee in the Oval Office, which, though consensual, was irresponsible and immoral, and thus raised serious questions about his judgment and his respect for the high office he holds. He then made false or misleading statements about that relationship to the American people, to a Federal district court judge in a civil deposition, and to a Federal grand jury; in so doing, he betrayed not only his family but the public's trust, and undermined his moral authority and public credibility.


That Lieberman ended up voting "not guilty" is immaterial; he made a point during his remarks of talking about "false and misleading statements to the American people" and "betraying the public trust." He was perfectly fine with bitchslapping Clinton in front of the entire nation for allegedly lying about a tawdry sexual affair, but when it comes to a president who neglects an entire city in a country over which he presides, we should just "move along, nothing to see here."

Joe Lieberman is in this for Joe Lieberman. He's not looking out for the interests of Americans, or the people of Connecticut, or anyone but Joe Lieberman's career. He is a selfish, venal, greedy man -- as selfish, greedy, and venal as the president with whom he loves to hobnob. And like that president, he likes to wrap himself up in the cloak of religion, but he shames that religion with every move he makes. He is truly a shandeh far di goyim, and makes me ashamed to be even the marginal Jew that I am.
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