The Odd Couple

No, not Felix and Oscar, but Joe and John: Lieberman and McCain. Putative Democrat and the Republican quondam candidate. Often appearing to be on the same side, their opinions drive us to confusion and not to any conclusion.

The right wing outrage machine has been like a chorus of vuvuzelas, blaring accusations that the classified rules of engagement instituted by General McChrystal on his own initiative were in fact forced on him by president Obama and his opposition, despite his sworn public testimony to the contrary, was the reason he was relieved of command. I suspect Joe Lieberman agrees, although I know he knows better.

The policy of trying to reduce the heavy civilian casualties so as to give the US less of the appearance of an invading horde bent on its own objectives and with no concern for innocent life or limb, is misguided says Lieberman; as though to say we shouldn't be concerned to appear as liberators with the best interests of Afghanistan at heart. We shouldn't care that people whose children we've cavalierly blown to hell aren't going to try to make our efforts any easier and so he's advising General Petraeus to shoot first and ask questions later. It's hurting our morale, says he as though 9 years of getting nowhere can be blamed on being the kind of nation we're supposed to be and more importantly as though it were president Obama's fault for worrying too much about worthless Muslim lives.

Perhaps John McCain's statement that even another ten years of war may not be too much to ask of our country, fits with Lieberman's disinterest in having the country we tell ourselves we're helping on our side. Ten more years of shooting up innocent families at weddings, on the streets, in their cars and in their homes will likely draw us into many more decades of war, and that McCain thinks this war is self justifying if not actually morally or functionally satisfying is not beyond conjecture. Another ten years, another 3, 4, 5 trillion dollars and who knows how many more dead: economic and moral collapse -- that should make the country crazy and enough to elect another Republican.

Pretty clever, and to think I thought McCain was an idiot.

Joe the Dumber

Senator Joe Lieberman is a cheap, pandering whore without a principle in his head and without much concern for history. Instead of being able to come up with some means to combat and prevent acts of terrorism, he's still looking for ways to make a criminal organization into a superpower complete with Army, Navy, Air Force and probably nuclear missiles. Any one working for a foreign terrorist organization should be stripped of his rights as a citizen. He doesn't bother to clarify whether that's before or after a fair trial, but I suspect the whole idea of a fair trial is anathema to his sort of Neanderthal conservatism. What an idiotic response to a failed truck bomb: attack the cornerstone of American liberty.

I wonder if he stops to contemplate how the Jews of Europe were suddenly deemed by the German government as being agents of a hostile foreign power and stripped of citizenship -- allowing the confiscation of their property and their exile to death camps.

No, someone willing to kill hundreds of people at random in Times Square is going to be deterred by a subsequent withdrawal of his citizenship? The shade of Mohammad Atta is laughing in Hell. What about domestic terrorist/murderer Tim McVeigh? Oh, that's OK, he wasn't working for foreigners.

What does Lieberman hope to accomplish other than to give hope to the barbarian Right that we can do as we like to anyone who isn't a citizen? God only gave rights to Americans, you see.

Whether he doesn't bother to or doesn't have the brain power to dismiss that worthless gesture of idiot rage is something not worth speculating on, but it's obvious that Joe Lieberman is all about Joe Lieberman trying to get attention by once again trying to rattle the cage of the ignorati instead of adding anything worthwhile to an important effort.

All's fair in lies and war

What a great thing it is that Joe Lieberman never found his way into the White House.

"We have to allow the president to allow the toughest measures to be used when there is an imminent threat to our country,"

he said yesterday.

"If we've got somebody that we think can tell us where a nuclear bomb is planted in an American city, then I want the president to be able to authorize that to be used."

Of course that's not the circumstance under which it has been used or is likely to be used and if that were the case an exception would always be made. No victim of US torture whether at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or in our secret dungeons anywhere has ever had any remote connection with a nuclear plot and much of the extracted information has been dangerously false.

Lieberman I'm afraid, is just another scare monger and panic pimp for the fascists who have taken over our government. What we have used it for has been to develop a case for having arrested someone. As John Stewart pointed out the other night, we tried and executed Japanese officers who waterboarded prisoners and in fact we did attack Japan and we did nuke them and the torture was done in the name of avoiding their destruction.

It's just another way for pious, Sabbath observing Lieberman to express his sense of America's divine purpose to dominate; a purpose which transcends the morality of the religion he flaunts. It's just another case of his and the administration's opinion that whatever we do is OK because we, like the Japanese and the Germans, are at war. We're at war with anybody we pick up on the street for any reason. We're at war with anyone we say we're at war with and anyone who talked to anyone or might talk to someone or sent an e-mail to his uncle Al Schneider in Al Abama.

Terrorists terrorists! We're at war! and if freedom and justice and sanity and our very humanity gets trampled in the panic, so much the better. Isn't it time we started calling them what they have always been - fascists? Secretly examining all our e-mail, our faxes, our phone calls and torturing us if they "think" we might know something or someone, and punishing us if we object - it's terrorism - It's Fascism what the hell else do you call it? Isn't it time we had the kind of guts Keith Olbermann shows, time to stop being the mewling cowards we're told to be and call them what they are?

Jingo Joe's Crusade

"When Congress reconvenes next week, all of us who are privileged to serve there should set aside whatever partisan or ideological differences divide us to send a clear, strong and unified message to Tehran that it must stop everything it is doing to bring about the death of American service members in Iraq."

That's what Jingo Joe Lieberman opines in his WSJ op ed piece today. I'm sure Mr. Ahmedinejad will smile at the "Chutzbah" as they say in Farsi. If Congress somehow does send that unified message, he will be able to file it along with the message we sent Iran by removing an elected government and installing a King and along with the message we sent by openly supplying Saddam Hussein in a bloody, protracted and chemical war against them. "don't stand up to US aggression" is just what he needs to read to his people in the interest of restoring anti-American unity.

It's not so much that I doubt the reassurance that there are Iranian made arms in Iraq that are traceable to government support of any particular insurgency, though of course I do, but that I doubt everything we are told and have ever been told about that conflict. Lieberman's choice of words; phrasing Iranian arms deals, Iranian reaction to what they see as aggression right on their border as "bringing about the death of American Service Members" is a grandstand play. As I said, it deconstructs to and is received as "don't resist our aggression into your world or we will kill you."

What answer do we expect other than "if you want to spare American troops, get the hell out" when we describe our "mission" just like another Crusade?