Good Riddance to 'The Conscience of the Senate'
For Throwback Wednesday, possibly the worst pol of all time
Time flies when you’re fighting Big Government. Difficult to believe that it’s been an entire decade since Joe Lieberman left the U.S. Senate.
There was no way I was going to miss commenting on his departure, and offer liberty-loving Americans a reason to be optimistic about 2013. To this day, I am (mostly) convinced that the valiantly brave editor of the only Connecticut publication to run this column got fired. (He was gone within days.) Never my purpose, of course, but it’s easy to imagine phone calls being made. The Nutmeg State’s establishment was always in the tank for Joe — same as its counterparts were for Harry Reid in Nevada, Dick Lugar in Indiana, Daniel Inouye in Hawaii, Pete Domenici in New Mexico, Robert Byrd in West Virginia, Frank Murkowski in Alaska, Fritz Hollings in South Carolina, Jim Jeffords in Vermont, Barbara Mikulski in Maryland, Bob Dole in Kansas, Sam Nunn in Georgia, Claiborne Pell in Rhode Island….
Enjoy!
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Whenever 2013 gets you down, find a quiet room, close your eyes, and whisper: Joseph I. Lieberman is no longer a U.S. Senator.
As a youth, Joe developed two great loves: 1) “public service” and 2) himself. In his reality, of course, the two quickly became one. After earning undergrad and law degrees from Yale, and well before his 30th birthday, Lieberman joined the Connecticut legislature. In the 1980s, he set the standard for the hyperactive attorney generalship that plagues many states today. At 46, he finally landed in Washington, and enthusiastically took his public-nuisancing national.
To the stunty solon, no corner of American life was immune from federal regulation, prohibition, or “incentivization.” Lieberman believed he could do a better job protecting children from offensive television, films, and videogames than parents. He wanted electricity to be generated at politically correct power plants. He warned his countrymen that the “lawncare chemical problem is a ticking public health time bomb.” He considered himself qualified to determine miles-per-gallon rates for automobiles.
But what mattered most to Lieberman was forcing taxpayers to fund a global crusade to promote “the values of freedom and justice and opportunity,” which “are universal and eternal values … right and true not only for us in our own time, but for all people in every time.”
As was so often the case with the most odious fedpol of the last quarter-century, Lieberman’s high-horse bluster had replaced an earlier, less expedient posture. In the late ‘60s, education and family deferments helped him escape Indochina’s slaughterhouse. In 1970, his book The Scorpion and the Tarantula averred that the U.S.-U.S.S.R. standoff was a conflict of moral equivalents: “[L]ike the case of the scorpion and the tarantula in the bottle … we may properly feel sorry for both parties, caught as they are, in a situation of irreducible dilemma.”
A decade later, running for the U.S. House of Representatives, Lieberman had “evolved” into a zealous Cold Warrior. In a debate, he grilled the Communist Party’s nominee “about the Polish workers’ struggle,” asking whether it didn’t “represent a failure of communism in Eastern Europe to benefit the very people for which it presumably took power.” (Multiple terms in Connecticut’s Senate had surely helped the candidate realize that an enormous number of “defense” dollars made their way to the submarines, helicopters, and fighter engines manufactured in the Nutmeg State.)
But 1980 brought little success for Democrats, and Lieberman would have to wait another eight years for the trip to D.C. He rapidly made up for lost time. Panama, Iraq I, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Iran, Libya, Syria — as writer George Szamuely put it, the senator never encountered “a United States military intervention that he was not willing to fund to the hilt or to pop on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to defend with his usual sanctimony.”
American conservatives once hewed to the belief that militarism, in Derek’s Leebaert’s phrase, is “the idealization of a determinedly backward stage of life.” But the modern right, in the thrall of bloodlusting neoconservatives, swooned over Lieberman’s unfailing commitment to chickenhawkery. The American Conservative Union assigns him a lifetime score of 16 — that’s on a 0-to-100 scale — but “The Conscience of the Senate” was never reluctant to go to war, so all was forgiven.
Besides, unlike those Democratic perverts from Hollywood and Manhattan, wasn’t the senator an “orthodox Jew”? Not exactly. In 2000, social conservative Don Feder noted that while Lieberman “may keep kosher and observe the Sabbath, in the political realm, [he] has the same allegiance to Torah values that Ted Kennedy has to Catholicism.” (NARAL and Planned Parenthood were big fans.)
Adherence to the moral tenets of orthodox Judaism wasn’t a priority for the twice-married Lieberman, but the senator never tired of peddling the claptrap that that the U.S. will never be safe until the Jewish State’s enemies are vanquished. In his shilling for Israel — a country Lieberman wasn’t born in, and is unlikely to immigrate to — no tactic stooped too low. As columnist Glenn Greenwald observed in 2010, the senator and fellow Israel Firsters “cynically exploit extremist Christian Rapture dogma for greater American fealty towards Israeli actions.”
The Republic has been liberated from the man Chris Matthews once called “the horniest, most ambitious politician I have ever seen in my life.” It’s wonderful news in a year that promises little progress in Washington. Savor Lieberman’s departure — and be on guard for the priggish and preening windbags who aspire to take his place.
I believe both your sisters were in that photo as well!
With the farm closed for the season Mom is on a mission to clear and shred unneeded paperwork, so once she’s done with that we MUST ask her to track down that photo!
Excellent article. I was wondering the last time that the nutmeg state elected a Republican to the US Senate and see that it was the "incomparable" Lowell Weicker. Apparently after losing his bid for Senate re-election in 1989, CT voters elected him governor where he returned the favor by signing the law that gave CT a state income tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators_from_Connecticut