Connecticut voters did what they felt was best for the country -- and should ignore the right-wing scolds who support Bush's failed policies.Aug. 11, 2006 | The overthrow of Joe Lieberman has intensified the anxieties of the Republican establishment and their friends in Washington's professional chattering class. This week they were full of furious insults, dire predictions and brazen lies about the political uprising of those well-heeled peasants in Connecticut who dared to ignore the conventional wisdom and did what they felt was best for country and party.
(snip)
So Vice President Dick Cheney claims that those Connecticut voters -- many of whom lost neighbors and friends on 9/11 -- encouraged "the al-Qaida types" by supposedly endorsing the "notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home." Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman accuses "national Democrat leaders" of "defeatism, isolationism, and blaming America first." And Weekly Standard editor William Kristol charges that those voters didn't really dump Lieberman because of his position on the war, but because "he's unashamedly pro-American." (Either those leafy suburbs are crawling with subversives, or Kristol is a nasty little McCarthyite.)
(snip)
"I (Michael Ware, Time's Baghdad bureau chief) and some other journalists had lunch with Senator Joe Lieberman the other day and we listened to him talking about Iraq. Either Senator Lieberman is so divorced from reality that he's completely lost the plot, or he knows he's spinning a line. Because one of my colleagues turned to me in the middle of this lunch and said he's not talking about any country I've ever been to and yet he was talking about Iraq, the very country where we were sitting."
In other words, Lieberman lacked credibility with voters on the most critical issue of the moment. He may pretend now to be a "critic" of the White House, but that isn't why Karl Rove has been calling every day since the primary to offer his support and best wishes.
more…
http://salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/08/11/pundits/
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