OK, I’ve gotta give Joe Lieberman credit. From Time this morning: [1]
Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will –and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.
At Time, Michael Scherer complains:
He is not just condemning his party’s position on Iraq, or praising McCain, his long-time friend. He is condemning in sweeping language the very core identity of the Democratic Party as weak and extremist. This is a tried and true Republican theme, which traditionally has more to do with scaring independent voters than with actual reasoned debate of the issues.
There’s no other way to call this one, gang;
Liberman is correct, insofar as he’s identified qualities that the right has already identified in him, whichw as what caused them to object so earlier this year. He’s also identified a partisanship that Zell Millar saw back in 2000, as Scherer correctly notes. Where Scherer gets it wrong, of course is that this is simply a matter of revenge. This is yet another Democrat who has correctly identified what’s happened to his party. The thematic similarlity of Liberman and Miller’s comments noted by Scherer as orchestration, are in fact an accurate read on Lieberman’s part. Put another way, This is not about Liberman changing. This is about the Democrats changing.
This is a bitter pill for the far left to swallow. But, you know, it was just a few short years back, the Democrats were willing to offer a VP post to Liberman based n his integrity. Maybe the Democrats should take the man seriously based on that integrity. They won’t of course, so deep are they in their partisanship. However; to ignore his warning is to ignore many millions of FORMER Democrats, who made their escape from the party for the reasons enumerated by Lieberman.
I’d like to see a study at some point; How many, I wonder, of the supposed ‘middle’, which we have for a long time identified as actually being leftist, are in reality, Democrats who have been disaffected as Zell Miller and Joe Liberman have been?
And don’t misread my comments as praise for Lieberman. He represents, in my view, a leftward tilt to the Republican party it… and the country as a whole… can ill afford… as it absorbs an increasing number of disaffected Democrats… run out of their party by the increasingly Stalinist tilt. My friends, if there’s an indication of just how much control the whacko left has over the Democrat party today, it’s the number of people being run out of it, that are showing up supporting middle-left Republicans. People like Joe Lieberman, and those that have been voting for him, including in the 2000 election. In the end, it’s those people that this election is going to come down to… as well as deciding the future of the Democrat party; assuming it actually HAS one.