By Dave Lindorff

The word is that Barack Obama, in keeping with his promise of a new
post-Bush/Cheney era of “civility in government,” is telling Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid not to eject the treacherous Sen. Joe
Lieberman (I-CT) from the Democratic caucus.

This is a terrible mistake. Joe Lieberman is a wretched example of
a man without principle—a back-stabbing slimeball of a politician whose
only allegience, apparently, besides to himself, is to Israel.

Now I don’t want anyone to think I’m some rabid anti-semite. My
wife and kids are Jewish, we have good friends who are Israeli, and no,
I don’t think the Jews run the media or the country. I do, however,
think that Joe Lieberman thinks more about what, in his warped and
shriveled worldview, is good for Israel, than about what is good for
America.

This senator from my childhood state of Connecticut, who back in
2000 ran as a standard-bearer of the Democratic Party as Al Gore’s
running mate, since 9-11 has been a warmonger of the first order, even
joining the right-wing Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) in trying to pass a
resolution in the senate last year which, had it made it through as he
originally worded it, would have effectively enabled—even
invited--George Bush to attack Iran at will as a part of Bush’s
megalomaniacal global “War” on Terror.

It is Lieberman’s obsession with having the US obliterate first
Iraq and now Iran, with nukes if need be, that led him to abandon his
party and become a leading supporter and apoligist for George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney, and later to become a key endorser of Sen. John
“Bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” McCain.

Lieberman also signed on enthusiastically to the worst excesses of
Bush’s and Cheney’s eight-year-long assault on the Constitution, the
Bill of Rights and International Law. As head of the Senate Homeland
Security Committee, Lieberman became the leading advocate of fascist
policies in the Senate, rivaled only by such ranting Republican
proto-fascists as Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and Rep. Michelle
Bachmann (R-MN). It was Lieberman who at least initially
enthusiastically backed Attorney General John Ashcroft’s mad proposal
(thankfully never implemented) to establish an Operation TIPS (for
Terrorist Information and Prevention Service) program that would have
recruited millions of Americans to spy on their neighbors and
co-workers, replicating the dreaded Stasi of Communist East Germany.
Only after libertarian-minded Republicans like former House Majority
Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) came out strongly against the scheme did
Lieberman have second thoughts, Initially, in fact, Lieberman had
personally, in his role as chair, blocked efforts by Sen. Patrick Leahy
(D-VT) to delete funding for Operation TIPS from a Homeland Security
Department funding bill before his committee.

The Democrats, who already are assured of 56 solid seats in their
caucus in the next Senate, with a chance at a couple more when all the
2004 Election races are settled and runoffs completed, don’t need a
weasel like Lieberman mucking up their ranks. If they need four more
votes to kill some Republican filibusters, they have Republicans they
can turn to, or cajole. If Barack Obama is smart (and he certainly is
that), he can also add a few—perhaps even four—Democrats to Senate
ranks by naming as many Republican senators as he needs to replace to
cabinet posts. As long as he names people like Sens. Susan Collins or
Olympia Snowe of Maine, or Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who represent
states with Democratic governors, those governors will be able to
appoint, as replacements, Democratic senators.

The other reason to shun Lieberman, and to cast him into the
legislative purgatory he so richly deserves, is that it would be an
object lesson to other potential Iagos in the party’s legislative ranks
that such treachery will not be tolerated. What, after all, is the
point of having a party at all, if its members can be as back-stabbing
as Lieberman and get away with it?

It would be a good lesson to the Democrats of the state of
Connecticut, too, who voted in a Democratic primary two years ago to
oust Lieberman as their candidate for re-election, but who then turned
around and joined Republicans in re-electing him when he ran as an
independent against a Republican challenger and against Ned Lamont, the
Democrat who had bested him in the primary. This was treachery by a
class of Democrats in the state of Connecticut that should also not go
unpunished. Connecticut voters should no longer have the benefit of a
powerful senator with seniority when that senator has so betrayed his
party.

Let Lieberman go over to the Republicans hat in hand. Let him
squirm as the Christian fundamentalists among them talk in tongues and
as others of them mutter their anti-semitic obscenities behind his
back. Let this one-time self-described advocate of civil rights blush
in shame as his new colleagues crack their racist jokes about the new
president in the lilly-white Republican caucus room.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in redemption as much as the next
atheist. I’d be perfectly happy to see Joey Lieberman back in the
Democratic caucus, but first he should be made to make a full public
apology both to Obama and to the millions of Democrats who elected the
nation’s first black president, as well as to the Democrats of his home
state of Connecticut, whose resounding 61-38% vote for Obama was the
biggest repudiation of Lieberman of all. That 38 percent tally is the
one he should have gotten when he ran for re-election last time. It’s
probably higher than he’d get if he ran today in Connecticut against
Lamont or any other Democrat.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF, a Connecticut native, is now a Philadelphia-based
journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His
work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net