Goodbye and Good Riddance to Lieberman

Hi! I'm back! Glenn Greenwald absolutely eviscerates the loathsome Joe Lieberman right here, and the entire sick Beltway Washington Villager culture that lionizes him. Excerpts (you better put on something fireproof here):

But the blood on Joe Lieberman's hands is accounted for by far more than support for the Iraq War. He's long been one of Washington's most indiscriminate, toxic and deceitful supporters of aggressive war generally. Even as the two wars he cheered on were spiraling out of control, he was repeatedly urging new American attacks against Iran, Syria and, most recently, Yemen. Lieberman -- who, needless to say, never served in the military nor have any of his children -- devoted his entire career to attempting to send other Americans' children to fight war after war after war. In sum, as The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch put it when examining the muddled history of Lieberman's opposition to the war in Vietnam: "the only war he ever opposed was the only war he might actually have had to fight in." But, of course, being a relentless warmonger while cowardly hiding yourself and your family far away from the wars you cheer on is not remotely inconsistent with being a Man of Decency and Conscience, as David Brooks and his many Beltway admirers will be the first to tell you.


Then there's Lieberman's vaunted "civility." He was not only one of the most vocal war supporters, but was responsible for some of the most toxic and McCarthyite efforts to stigmatize war opposition as illegitimate and even treasonous. In 2005, he infamously lectured Democratic war critics that "in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril," and in 2007 used the language of treason to pose leading questions to Gen. David Petraeus to induce the General's agreement that war opposition "would give the enemy some comfort." Worse, Lieberman often bolstered these smears with outright lies, such as when he claimed on Meet the Press that we were "attacked on 9/11 by the same enemy we're fighting in Iraq today." Behold his grand civility.


And then there's the leading role Lieberman played in lending Democratic support to the whole litany of Bush/Cheney assaults on basic liberties. He defended the "Bush interrogation program" and even waterboarding, and was one of only two Democrats to vote against banning it. He led the way -- along with his close friends John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- in enacting the Military Commissions Act, which explicitly denied all detainees the right to contest their detention in a court of law: a measure so repressive that the Supreme Court in Boumediene struck it down as unconstitutional, citing Alexander Hamilton's warning that "the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, in all ages, is the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny." Once the Court re-established the habeas right which Lieberman and his comrades snuffed out, it turned out, as federal courts found, that there was no credible evidence to justify the detention of a huge percentage of remaining detainees at Guantanamo: innocent people who would have been imprisoned indefinitely to this day -- without a shred of due process -- if Lieberman had his way.

Read the whole righteous denunciation. And realize what a blessing it will finally be to get that fraudulent, lying, back-stabbing SCHMUCK Lieberman out of the Senate once and for all.