Bipartisan praise for Joe Lieberman

Glenn Greenwald
Jan. 22, 2011

Joe Lieberman this week announced his involuntary retirement from the Senate -- compelled by humiliatingly high disapproval ratings in his own state and the 2006 ejection from his own party -- and Beltway denizens are now rushing to heap praise on this Deeply Principled, Civil, and Decent Man of Conscience. The New York Times' spokesman for establishment wisdom and entitlement, David Brooks, today hails Lieberman as "A Most Valuable Democrat" and gushes over his "courageous independence of mind"; Brooks also quotes several leading Democrats venerating the four-term Connecticut Senator, including John Kerry ("a terrific senator" who is "defined himself by his conscience and beliefs"), Harry Reid ("an integral part of the Democratic caucus") and Joe Biden ("Joe’s leadership and powerful intellect" are overwhelming but "it is his civility that will be missed the most"). Brooks also approvingly cites a post from The Washington Post's Ezra Klein suggesting (not without qualification) that Lieberman is a "Democratic hero" because he voted for most of Obama's domestic agenda over the last two years.

Conspicuously missing from any of these paeans is the issue most responsible for the contempt in which many liberals (and anti-war conservatives) hold Lieberman: his vigorous, ongoing support for the attack on Iraq. Why allow the small matter of a decade-long, brutal occupation that eradicated the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings to negatively affect the reputation of a Washington official? To bring any of that up is so very uncivil and past-obsessed. Like torture, illegal eavesdropping, CIA black sites, the systematic denial of due process in a worldwide prison regime, and the ongoing Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning acts of war entailing things like this (all of which Lieberman also supported), the Iraq War is written off -- flushed down the memory hole -- as nothing more than one of those garden-variety "policy differences" about which reasonable, decent people disagree.

Support for all those violent and illegal acts just isn't something we hold against someone, and it's certainly not going to preclude someone from being a "Democratic hero." Indeed, even Lieberman's false claim -- repeated just yesterday -- that we found evidence that Saddam was developing WMDs (while patronizingly calling Arianna Huffington "sweetheart" after she disagreed) won't interfere at all in these admiration rituals, even (especially) in Beltway Democratic circles.

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