"Democrats and Our Enemies" (Lieberman's WSJ op-ed hit piece)

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Democrats and Our Enemies
By JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
May 21, 2008; Page A19

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121132806884008847.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries



How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom."

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault.

Of course that leftward lurch by the Democrats did not go unchallenged. Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson fought against the tide. But despite their principled efforts, the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s became prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.

Then, beginning in the 1980s, a new effort began on the part of some of us in the Democratic Party to reverse these developments, and reclaim our party's lost tradition of principle and strength in the world. Our band of so-called New Democrats was successful sooner than we imagined possible when, in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected. In the Balkans, for example, as President Clinton and his advisers slowly but surely came to recognize that American intervention, and only American intervention, could stop Slobodan Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic slaughter, Democratic attitudes about the use of military force in pursuit of our values and our security began to change.

This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate – Vice President Gore – championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America's moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent – and, to the dismay of the Democratic left, made sure that the party's platform endorsed a national missile defense.

By contrast, in 2000, Gov. George W. Bush promised a "humble foreign policy" and criticized our peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

Far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to these opinions rather than challenging them. That unfortunately includes Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party's left wing on a single significant national security or international economic issue in this campaign.

In this, Sen. Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it.

John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately – the difference between America's friends and America's enemies.

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

If a president ever embraced our worst enemies in this way, he would strengthen them and undermine our most steadfast allies.

A great Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, once warned "no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." This is a lesson that today's Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut. This article is adapted from a speech he gave May 18 at a dinner hosted by Commentary magazine.

[DerekJ]

1. "Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut"

:rofl: :rofl:

[Ashy Larry]

2. This is just a preview of his convention speech

at the RNC this summer. They're hoping it will have more impact than Zell Miller's last time. It actually might because he was the VP nominee just 8 years ago. People who don't pay much attention to politics might think its a big deal for him to say this stuff. It will be up to the leadership of the Democratic Party to make it clear to everybody that Joe is not a Democrat and has not been for quite some time.

[FrenchieCat]

3. Did we need the whole fucking article with the picture and everything?

Isn't that like copright infringement or something? Doesn't DU request that this not be done unless it is your own article or you have gotten expressed permission?

and why do I give a flying fuck as to what McCain't braying hinchman has to say? :shrug:

[pop goes the weasel]

4. Connecticut

There must be something in the water that generates evil. Or is it the nutmeg? I've read that shit can seriously mess you up. Did the Bushes and Lieberman sit around one night, smoking everything in the spice cabinet?

[krispos42]

5. Did Joe "Rusty Trombone" Lieberman hand out rolls of TP with this?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

Yeah, and how did those interventionist policies in the Middle East work out for us? Supporting authoritarian, oppressive, monarchial regimes must be some obscure method of being pricipled and making moral judgements and standing united with free people that I missed in my dictionary. That must explain things like overthrowing the elected government of Iran and installing a ruthless strongmad. Backing the dictator of Iraq. Supporting and defending the theocratic, sexist, racist, fundamentalist, non-constitutional monarchy of Saudi Arabia.

*****

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

This came apart because we were too damn busy wasting ourselves in a stalemate in Vietnam trying to buy time for the "free" people of South Vietnam to get their act together. And it turns out that the "free" people of South Vietnam really weren't interested in being free. So we really weren't defending a free people, but we somehow managed to kill about two million of them in the process because some warhawks in power couldn't just let it go.

*****

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America's fault.

News to me. I thought they were our enemey because they pointed lots of missiles at us and had a hundred armored divisions ready to swoop down on Western Europe to liberate it from the chains of capitalistic imperialist pigs and replace them with communist imperialistic pigs.

*****

Of course that leftward lurch by the Democrats did not go unchallenged. Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson fought against the tide. But despite their principled efforts, the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s became prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.

Um, yeah, because the US army was in such great shape during this time? All rarin' to go and confront some more Commies in some god-forsaken shithole? And where was there Communist aggression in the '70s and '80s? Did I miss something? Did Cuba invade Puerto Rico? Did China invade Taiwan? What happened?

*****

Then, beginning in the 1980s, a new effort began on the part of some of us in the Democratic Party to reverse these developments, and reclaim our party's lost tradition of principle and strength in the world. Our band of so-called New Democrats was successful sooner than we imagined possible when, in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected. In the Balkans, for example, as President Clinton and his advisers slowly but surely came to recognize that American intervention, and only American intervention, could stop Slobodan Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic slaughter, Democratic attitudes about the use of military force in pursuit of our values and our security began to change.

Um... if it wasn't for Ross Perot, Pappy Bush would have been a two-termer. The "New Democrats" had help. And it turns out that Perot was right about NAFTA and globalization.

In the Balkans it was a NATO effort, not just us.

And I note that Mr. oh-so-pricipaled-and-strong New Democrat didn't lift a finger to help people like, say, the Kurds from Saddam. In fact, if I recall correctly, an awful lot of that poison gas has "Made in USA" stamped on the canisters.

Reagan cut-and-run from Beirut after 241 Marines were killed. Yet somehow he's strong???

And didn't both Pakistan and India get nuclear weapons at this time? In fact, didn't we bribe Pakistan with nuclear-arms technology and equipment so we could support that wonderful freedom fighter and well-known progressive secular humanitarian Osama Bin Laden in their fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan?

How's that working out for us now?

Oh, right. Pakistan is an unstable military dictatorship with a strong fundamentalist streak and nuclear weapons, and Osama killed a few thousand people and inspired millions of America-hating Muslims around the world.

Yay...

*****

Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Bullshit. First of all, it wasn't a military attack. Second of all, they don't hate us for what we are, they hate us for what we have done to their region of the world. And for insulting their religion.

Do you really think they get so upset with things like American women wearing jeans and driving cars they're willing to strap ten pounds of plastiquι to their bodies and blow themselves up?

No, they do it because we keep killing them and fucking with their governments to keep the oil flowing!

And we did confront the terrorists with unity and strength. We invaded and occupied Afghanistan, took out the terrorist-supporting and-defending Taliban regime, and made some attempt to try to capture Bin Laden, but that really didn't work out that well.

And then we invaded Iraq, but that had nothing to do with confronting terrorism. That had to do with securing all the oil under the sand that had been largely undisturbed during the Iran-Iraq war and the post-Desert Storm oil embargo. While the other nations pumped away, Iraq's oil fields were largely unpumped and fat with oil.

*****

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

IRAQ WAS NOT ABOUT TERRORISM, YOU Q-TIP-LOOKING MOTHERFUCKER! STOP LYING! AND STOP REPEATING THE LIES!!!

And the "War on Terror" is a rhetorical device! It doesn't actually mean mobilizing divisions and maneuvering fleets! When did the 82nd Airborne drop in the War on Drugs, hmmmm? It's a fucking stateless actor we're fighting! There is no country called Terrorstan! There is no capitol city Terroropolis!

It means tracking downt he organization using brains, and when you have something you use Special Forces like a SWAT team to take the fuckers out!

And the partisanship you accuse Democrats of? WRONG SIDE! The Republicans used every accusation of partisanship possible to get exactly what their agenda wanted. What does the "War on Terror" have to do with corporate tax cuts or relaxing rules for pharmaceutical companies? Yet they SHAMELESSLY used "we're at war, we need to be unified!" false unity to pass their entire neocon agenda.

Collaboration with idiocy is idiocy in and of itself. A good rule of thumb is that it's better to do nothing that do what Bush wants.

And in case you haven't noticed, when the Democrats were pulled to the right, everything went to shit! Our roads deteriorated, our schools sucked, our health care sucked, our unions dissolved, the media coagulated into behemoth infotainment companies, and our jobs went overseas. Oh, and we own nine trillion buck to our grandchildren and the top 10% of income earners have more political influence than the bottom 90%.

And, finally, Joe, it's not Saddam or Bin Laden that's worked to hard to take away my Constitutional rights. It's not Saddam or Bin Laden that terrifies the American people day and night. It's Bush and his supporters, like you.

*****

Far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to these opinions rather than challenging them. That unfortunately includes Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party's left wing on a single significant national security or international economic issue in this campaign.

No, lackwit, far too many Democratic leaders kowowed to Bush and his lies and fearmongering and utterly insane economic ideas.

And in case you haven't noticed, Republican international ecomomic ideas suck like a fuckin' singularity. So do their national security issues.

*****

In this, Sen. Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it.

McCain flip-flops like a dying fish in the bottom of a motorboat. The fact that you either don't realize this, or don't care about it, speaks very poorly of your moral compass.

*****

John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately – the difference between America's friends and America's enemies.

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Those regimes are not anti-American, they're anti-Bush. You know, the guy that's threatened to nuke Iran over a weapons program they don't have?

Gee, do you think THAT might have something to do with why Iran's a little paranoid about us?

Keep in mind, lackwit, that it was IRAN that was holding candlelight vigils for us after 9/11 while the rest of the Middle East was cheering and partying.

And it was the CIA that tried to overthrow Chavez in an aborted coup.

How about WE maybe acknowledge when we've done wrong and apologize?









Wholly Joe, you definately deserve my nickname for you, "Rusty Trombone".

Rusty trombone is a euphemism for a sexual act in which a man stands with his knees and back slightly bent, with feet at least shoulder width apart in order to expose the anus. The other partner typically is on his or her knees behind the man and performs analingus while reaching up beneath the testicles or around the body to masturbate the man, mimicking the motions of a trombone player. The act is defined primarily by the physical orientation of the partners and the combination of analingus with manual penile stimulation; however, other positions and variations are possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Trombone

Remember, Joe, Bush likes grape jelly in his crack and the head massaged quickly but gently with KY. Give Bush a happy ending and he'll return the favor!

[casus belli]

6. "Reagan never met with Khomeini"

No. He decided it was better to trade weapons for hostages. What a sack of dung this guy turned out to be.