Political Football

Link - from Powerlineblog.com

Senator Lieberman reflects on the Democratic Party

Watching the Democratic presidential candidates’ forum on MSNBC last week, I was most struck by the candidates’ apparent belief that the Bush administration is the principal threat to the United States. According to a speech he gave yesterday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, Senator Lieberman has observed by the same phenomenon among his Senate Democratic colleagues. Eli Lake reports in today’s New York Sun:

“Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.”Those words were part of a speech that traced Mr. Lieberman’s own position on the war in the tradition of not only the great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, but also the interventionism of President Clinton and his vice president, Albert Gore, a man who has played to the net roots base that tried and failed to unseat Mr. Lieberman in 2006.

Mr. Lieberman was particularly critical of his 22 Democratic colleagues in the Senate who voted against the senator’s resolution to label Iran’s revolutionary guard corps and elite Quds Force a foreign terrorist entity. He accused liberal Web logs of peddling a “conspiracy theory,” namely that the legislation was a back door authorization for war. Also, without naming names, he said some of his colleagues who had voted against it said they agreed with its substance, but told the senator, “We don’t trust Bush. He’ll use this resolution as an excuse for war against Iran.”

Mr. Lieberman concluded, “There is something profoundly wrong-something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.” He added, “There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base — even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.”

These observations from respectable players and observers such as Senator Lieberman cannot be repreated often enough, as only public shaming holds the prospect of inducing responsibility. Senator Lieberman has posted the full text of his speech under the title “The politics of national security.” It deserves wide circulation and serious discussion. Thinking along the same lines, the Sun has published a companion editorial on Senator Lieberman’s speech.

Checking today’s New York Times, however, it appears that Senator Lieberman’s speech is not among the news fit to print.

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