Op-Ed Column: The True Story of Traitor Joe

Since last week's election, the mainstream media has painted Joe Lieberman as something between an abandoned spouse, a noble warrior and - most astonishingly - a principled maverick.

In truth, he has revealed himself to be one of the most self-righteous, grossly opportunistic and traitorous politicians in recent U.S. history.

On Meet the Press this past Sunday, a gloating Lieberman described himself as an "Independent Democrat." Of course, he is independent only of shame. But the mainstream media's narrative of Traitor Joe seems to jettison the most pertinent facts of his contemptible road to victory.

After his Democrat constituents clearly rejected him in favor of Ned Lamont in the Connecticut primary, only then did he decide to run as an Independent in the national election. Pure calculation. Literally and figuratively. He realized running as a third-party candidate, a Republican dressed in an Independent's clothing pretending to be a Democrat at heart, he'd split the vote in his favor. But the Republican Party leaders' public support for their loyal friend was what pushed this private servant over the top. In doing so, they pulled the plug on promoting their own party's candidate to such a degree that most voters would've been hard-pressed to cite his name or recognize his face. Far from a newfound populism or a genuine ideological rebirth, Joe Lieberman's political life was dependent on this switch. And in the last couple of weeks before the national election, when it became clear through polls that Lieberman had a sound lead, the mainstream media showed its cards early.

The talking point? Americans rejected the anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. If the Democrats are to win, it's not enough for them to oppose the president's handling of the war in Iraq. They must stand for something, not just against the war and the Bush administration. (As if standing against this White House's flagrant law-breaking and lethal incompetence wasn't standing for something, as if rising up to save us from a Constitutional crisis, tripping up the march to full-blown fascism, weren't enough.) Bush trotted out this talking point in his few remaining pre-election stump speeches. Still without a viable Iraq strategy of his own after three years and with the blood of over a half million dead on his hands, he invoked the hollow zeal of an infomercial host, leading his pre-screened crowds to ask his Democratic opponents, "What's your plan?!"

Though, sadly for Bush and the Republican Party, it turned out that neither being devoid of a plan nor asking Democrats to furnish one for him in the closing moments of an election managed to dispel his indelible image of fecklessness. Of Junior, the boy-king who breaks every toy ever handed to him and then blames someone else for it.

Then came the Democrats' colossal victory. Suddenly, all the national pundits declared a new talking point: The election was a referendum on the war in Iraq.

Yet they wanted to have their cake and Lieberman, too.

In the primary, Democratic voters of Connecticut expressed their disgust at Lieberman's "stay the course" fidelity to George Bush and his policies. The metaphorical weight of the infamous kiss. The capo-like support of this administration's post-9/11 McCarthyite rhetoric, which cast any American who did not fall in lockstep behind their president as a terrorist sympathizer. The good citizens of Connecticut said enough was enough. That's what is supposed to happen in a democracy. A principled politician, someone who gives a damn about the people he represents and who respects the democratic process, would have accepted defeat in the primary with humbleness and grace, licked his wounds out of the limelight, congratulated his opponent and thrown him his support in hopes of defeating the Republican candidate.

But not Joe Lieberman.

To Traitor Joe, clinging to power trumps the democratic process. Quoting Thomas Jefferson may be politically expedient to him, the Founding Fathers' words may sound good on paper, but when you get right down to it, Joe Lieberman cares much less about our freedoms and justice and human suffering than he does about himself. 

Now comes the mainstream media's rewrite of the storyline. It was the Democratic Party establishment, you see, and not the voters, that tossed Joe Lieberman to the curb in favor of upstart Ned Lamont. Never mind that it was, in fact, Lieberman who had long before tossed his own constituents, his own party and the rest of the American people to the curb, who embraced this administration's tyrannical rule with the kind of self-serving obsequiousness France's Vichy government showered on the Nazis.

That's why he lost to Ned Lamont in the primary before unconscionably manipulating the system to win at any cost in the national election (in which, incidentally, he received a meager 33% of the Democratic vote).

Before and after the midterm election, Traitor Joe showed absolutely no loyalty to the party in which he has made his name and to the people he took an oath to represent. Moreover, worse than merely failing to live up to that oath, he usurped his constituents' only method of holding him accountable. Yet, with a Bush-era inversion of reality, it is disloyalty for which he and the media are accusing the Democratic Party leadership. Simultaneously, the actions Lieberman is now taking - his threats of jumping parties should any Senate Democrat oppose him on key issues, his insufferable self-importance and unseemly display of self-entitlement, his refusal to bend for the greater good - is precisely why the Democrats in Connecticut said, Hell no, no more Joe.

The media's reframing of this drama has provided the stage for Lieberman's ignoble performance. Yet he is sorely miscast as a wounded Caesar. Toward his nation, his constituents and his own party, it is a bastardized version of Brutus, rather, that more closely captures Lieberman's true character over these last five years. A dictator's confidant who, rather than moving against the tyrant, instead continually sticks it to his fellow citizens in order to protect what he believes is rightfully his. A ruthless conniver. A killer even, if the means to his end demand it.

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

The True Story of Traitor Joe

You may want to remember that in a "democracy" the majority of people rule, and the majority of people voted in favor of Lieberman. The fraud of a democracy that the United States uses is a two party tyranny. By saying screw you to the few people who vote in the primary and temporarily to the democrats as a whole Lieberman brought American politics closer to a real democracy where people vote on the man and not the party.

That said, I didn't vote for him.

[MediaBloodhound]

Thanks for your comment. I have many problems with the exclusionary practices of our two-party system. That said, I think your statement obscures the matter at hand. It seems a bit intellectually dishonest, or, at the very least, takes some tunnel vision to outright ignore the context surrounding Lieberman's actions. As you well know, he opted to run on the Independent ticket not out of his concern for the democratic process, but for the purely cynical reason of holding on to power by any means necessary. Primaries happen to be part of our democratic process. The Democrats of Connecticut - the people who elected him to office in the first place - spoke, and their feelings were no different than the majority of Americans. They rejected Lieberman's blind support for this administration and the Iraq War. Lieberman didn't honor their wishes. Nonetheless, he expected - and then received post-election - all the perks that his Democratic Party clout affords him. If Lieberman's circumvention of his primary defeat hadn't merely been a ploy to disregard his constituents' wishes and to cling desperately to power, he would've remained an Independent after the election, no?

Moreover, the Republican Party overtly supported Lieberman for the same reason he jumped to the Independent ticket - to retain power. Period. This is undeniable. They pulled all support for their GOP candidate in Connecticut. Tell me how this was a boon to our democratic process?

Finally, further proof of how well Lieberman's move benefited our democratic process was his threats since Election Day to jump ship. Threatening to switch parties if your colleagues don't vote with you doesn't bring "American politics closer to a real democracy." Instead, some disagreement within each party (as well as in the executive and judicial branches of government) does just that; it adds to the checks and balances, no matter who holds the majority. (Imagine how much wiser the Republican Party's decisions might have been during its reign had it not simply rubber-stamped everything, had it served even minimally to give oversight to this extremist administration.)

What Lieberman is doing now with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate is the farthest thing from democracy in action.

It's blackmail.