{news} LA Weekly article on G.I. Joe Lieberman and his discontents

[smderosa]

Here is an article that is a bit dated but still full of interesting facts
about our favorite republican by journalist Doug Ireland.  It might be of
use in understanding Corporate Joe and his views.
Sincerely, 
Mike DeRosa
 
 HYPERLINK "http://www.laweekly.com/commonimages/logos/lalogo.gif"
JULY 11 - 17, 2003 

Holy Joe, Corporate Joe, G.I. Joe
Will the real Senator Lieberman please stand up?
by Doug Ireland 

 HYPERLINK "http://www.laweekly.com/images/ink/03/34/sm34news2.jpg"
(Illustration by Ismael Roldan) 	
As Joe Lieberman spoke at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH forum for
presidential contenders last month, the overwhelmingly black audience
clapped when he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. Yet how many would have
applauded if they’d known that the candidate from the Nutmeg State was a fan
of the author of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life, which promoted the junk-science-for-bigots theory that blacks
are genetically inferior to whites? How many realized that he had declared
affirmative action to be “un-American,” called on the Democrats to abandon
it and supported a California ballot initiative to ban it — all of which
once caused the Rev. Jesse Jackson to travel to New Haven for a rally to
denounce “Jesse Helms–Lieberman deals”? “We submit to the senator of this
state,” Jackson roared in 1995, “that we have marched too long, and have
died too young. We have been to too many funerals to turn back now! No, Mr.
Lieberman, we are moving forward!” As recently as 1998, Lieberman’s Senate
voting was so bad that the NAACP gave him a “D” rating on its report card.

This is just part of the record that Lieberman now tries to run away from.
Most of the mainstream press corps keeps presenting a sanitized version of
Lieberman’s bio, but some of the things he’d rather forget are well worth
remembering now that he’s a national candidate.

On March 9, 1995, in remarks at the National Press Club, as chairman of the
pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, Lieberman denounced the case
for affirmative action as “an un-American argument because it’s based on
averages, not individuals,” and went on to praise Ward Connerly’s
Proposition 209, the misnamed “California Civil Rights Initiative,” which
outlawed affirmative action: “I can’t see how I could be opposed to it,
because it basically is a statement of American values.” The year before,
the New Haven Advocate’s excellent Paul Bass — who’s covered Lieberman for
22 years — wrote, “After meeting with racist scholar [and Bell Curve author]
Charles Murray, Lieberman promoted Murray’s idea of taking children away
from mothers on welfare and putting them in new government-run orphanages
(rather than, for instance, boosting support for agencies seeking to keep
together families in crisis).”

Lieberman didn’t always talk that way — he started out in politics as a
supporter of Robert F. Kennedy and an opponent of the Vietnam War. When he
represented a half–African-American New Haven district in the state Senate,
he paraded himself as a liberal friend to the poor. What changed?

Ambition, pure and simple. In the Reagan-landslide year of 1980, Lieberman
ran for Congress — and lost to a GOPer who cut Lieberman’s 17-point lead in
the polls by attacking him as “too liberal.” “After he lost, Joe was advised
by party stalwarts he couldn’t continue to be a progressive across the board
if he wanted to move up,” recalls Irv Stolberg, the liberal former speaker
of the Connecticut House, and later the founder of the state’s progressive
Caucus of Concerned Democrats. It’s hardly surprising that Lieberman
listened to the party bosses: His undergraduate thesis — published in 1966
as a book, The Power Broker — was a hagiography of the tough and cynical
John Bailey, Connecticut’s legendary ham-fisted Democratic boss, whose creed
was “You do whatever you have to do to win.”

Take the 1988 campaign in which Lieberman won a U.S. Senate seat by
defeating liberal GOPer Lowell Weicker. In that campaign, Lieberman attacked
Weicker — who espoused views Lieberman once held — from the right. He was so
conservative in that race that William F. Buckley Jr., founder of the
conservative National Review and a Connecticut native, formed a political
action committee to raise money for Lieberman. For example, Lieberman
redbaited Weicker for opposing the trade embargo against Cuba (and, then as
later, raked in significant campaign cash from ultraright Cuban exiles).

 

As a senator, Lieberman continued his path to the right. For example,
Lieberman has a long record of political homophobia. Lieberman, who told the
New Haven Advocate that “homosexuality is wrong,” joined with notorious
homo-hater Jesse Helms in voting to take away federal funding from schools
that counsel suicidal gay teens that it’s okay to be gay. On gays in the
military, Lieberman has enunciated the now-discredited canard that
“homosexual conduct can harm unit cohesion and effectiveness.” (Tell that to
the dozens of countries, from England to Israel, that permit openly gay
troops in their armed forces.)

In fact, Lieberman worked with Georgia’s Sam Nunn to fashion the destructive
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which resulted in escalating expulsions of
gays from the military every year after it took effect. Its Catch-22
provisions have directly stimulated a rising wave of violent gay bashing and
harassment in the military because victims can’t complain without “telling.”

This is just part of the record that has made Lieberman his party’s most
notorious theocrat. The Scripture-quoting Lieberman made God-bothering a
staple of his 2000 vice-presidential campaign: That August, Holy Joe told a
Detroit congregation never to imagine “that morality can be maintained
without religion.” This position was denounced as “unsettling” by no less
than the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL), which released a
letter to him arguing tartly that “To even suggest that one cannot be a
moral person without being a religious person is an affront to many highly
ethical citizens.”

Prayer in the schools? Holy Joe lined up with the GOP’s religious zealots to
push it repeatedly in the Senate. Subsidizing parochial schools at the
expense of public education? Holy Joe has sponsored legislation to give
parents vouchers to send their kids to parochial schools, draining money
from the public schools to which most Americans send their kids. And
Lieberman just last year joined with rabid gay basher Rick Santorum — the
Pennsylvania Republican who compared same-sex love to bestiality and incest
— to co-sponsor George Bush’s faith-based initiatives, praising Bush’s
“leadership” in tearing down the constitutional barrier between church and
state. The faith-based initiatives turned out in practice to be a
political-patronage operation for churches and ministers that support Bush.
Lieberman’s censorious partnership with slot-machine addict Bill Bennett in
attacking the entertainment industry has been widely publicized. Less well
known, however, are Lieberman’s ties to a skein of religious-right and
conservative organizations. Holy Joe has been closely involved with The
Empowerment Network (TEN), which proclaims that it “provides the winning
edge” on “the unleashing of faith-based initiatives and cultural remedies.”
Lieberman and his buddy Rick Santorum are listed by TEN as Empowerment
Caucus chairmen. As Bill Berkowitz has reported in his “Working for Change”
column, TEN was “founded in 1992 by a coterie of right-wing ideologues.”
They include Clint Bollick of the anti–affirmative action, pro–school
voucher Institute for Justice; David Caprara, TEN’s current president,
lately the American Family Coalition’s national director, and a former top
aide to Housing Secretary Jack Kemp in the Bush I administration; and Sam
Brunelli, national finance chairman of the Republican Liberty Council.

Lieberman, in 1995, joined with Lynne Cheney — the wife of Dubya’s veep and
a longtime left-baiter of academics in universities — to found the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA, formerly the National Alumni Forum),
whose mission was to fight “political correctness” on campus. ACTA, which
has helped whip up anti-intellectual hysteria in the post-9/11 period, came
to public prominence when it issued and widely publicized a McCarthyite
blacklist of 117 so-called “anti-American academics” who questioned
America’s infallibility in wartime. One of them was Douglas J. Bennet, the
president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut. After this incident was
aired in the Connecticut press, Holy Joe expressed “regrets” to the
university prez and asked ACTA to stop identifying him as a “founder” on its
Web site. But have-it-both-ways Joe didn’t resign from the group.

Then there’s Lieberman’s long record of coddling Corporate America, as
befits a DLC ideologue who benefits from corporate campaign cash. If the
Democrats failed to make political hay out of the corporate scandals when
they still had control of the Senate — and thus blew a chance to revive
their waning electoral fortunes — it was in large measure due to the
conciliatory spinelessness of Lieberman as former chairman of the Senate
Committee on Governmental Affairs, which has primary jurisdiction over fraud
and corruption within the executive branch. In an article, “The Tyranny of
Triangulation: Can Joe Lieberman Lead?,” in the May 20, 2002, issue of The
American Prospect, Nicholas Confessore related how “Three months after
Lieberman said he would launch an investigation of Enron’s collapse, his
committee has held only a handful of hearings and has yet to subpoena a
single Bush administration official. Contrast [this] with [his predecessor,
GOPer] Fred Thompson’s wide-ranging probe into fund-raising abuses during
the 1996 election: The committee held 33 days of hearings, interviewed 200
witnesses, and issued dozens of subpoenas to Clinton administration
officials.”

When Lieberman gave what aides billed as a major Enron-related speech in New
York entitled “Business Ethics in the Post-Enron Era,” Lieberman told his
audience that Enron was “a grand metaphor” — not for the dangers of market
fundamentalism or crony capitalism, but “for the real human problems that
profit pressure can produce when it is unchecked by personal principles or
business ethics.” No mention from Lieberman of the many incestuous contacts
Texan Ken Lay and his corrupt cronies had with top Bushies, including Vice
President Dick Cheney, the husband of Joe’s pal. Holy Joe, of course, had
taken Enron campaign cash, and his ex–chief of staff had become a pricey
Enron lobbyist, as the AP later reported.

 

There’s so much corporate water carrying in the senator’s record it’s hard
to do it justice. A little-noticed Jim VandeHei story in the September 11,
2000, Wall Street Journal detailed how Lieberman was the insurance
industry’s “go-to guy on the Democratic side of the aisle.” He teamed up
with Dick Armey to successfully limit lawsuits stemming from auto accidents
by permitting lower rates for drivers who forfeit their right to sue for
pain and suffering; and sponsored bills that limited legal damages against
tobacco producers, HMOs and drug companies as well as against asbestos
manufacturers and any business that manufactured a defective product — and,
by extension, protecting their insurance companies. The chief lobbyist for
the American Tort Reform Association — a lobby funded by manufacturers —
told the National Law Journal, “If it were not for Lieberman, there would
never have been a Biomaterials Access Act,” which immunized corporate giants
such as Dow and Dupont against lawsuits for defective components used in the
manufacture of medical implants.

Some of the worst corporate abuses and fraud were traceable to Lieberman’s
1993 success in squelching an attempt to make companies report executives’
stock options as part of their expenses. The Advocate’s Bass reported that
Lieberman “went to bat for West Coast Silicon Valley high-tech execs to lead
a fight against President Clinton’s promised curbs on runaway executive pay;
the execs responded with a fund-raiser for Joe’s re-election.”

And the list goes on . . .

The Lieberman who opposed the Vietnam War also became, over the years, G.I.
Joe. He’s never met a weapons system he didn’t like — consistently voting
during the Clinton years for more money for the Pentagon than the
administration requested.

G.I. Joe is a firm supporter of Ronald Reagan’s favorite movie-inspired
fantasy, Star Wars. It’s now disappeared from his Web site, but when he was
running for veep, his site’s “legislative accomplishments” section boasted:
“Breaking with many in his party, Senator Lieberman was an original
co-sponsor of legislation to spur the deployment of a missile defense system
capable of protecting the U.S. against a limited attack.” Star Wars, of
course, is a military-industrial boondoggle riddled with outright fraud and
stratospheric cost overruns — and it still doesn’t work. G.I. Joe has
willingly inclined toward every imperative of Bush’s national-security state
— for example, he was a strong supporter of John Ashcroft’s notorious TIPS
program, which would have turned America into a nation in which neighbor
spied upon neighbor. When Vermont liberal Pat Leahy tried to include an
amendment to the Homeland Security bill forbidding TIPS, Lieberman blocked
the amendment. When the conventional wisdom turned against TIPS, as he was
planning his national candidacy, Lieberman — in a typical finger-in-the-wind
performance — withdrew his support for the program. (This was reminiscent of
his pirouette on Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court: Having
promised his “yes” vote to the White House if they needed it, he waited
until the end of the roll call, when Thomas had enough votes to be
confirmed, and then voted “no” to keep the liberals and women’s groups at
home off his back.)

But the quintessential Lieberman act of opportunism was his mad dash to the
Rose Garden to stand shoulder to shoulder with Dubya and co-sponsor the
resolution that gave away Congress’ constitutional power to declare war on
Iraq — a war launched on a sea of Bush-Powell mendacities that Lieberman has
yet to criticize.

All in all, as a Democrat, Lieberman makes a great Republican.


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