Joe Lieberman Walks the Valley of the Shadow

by Smitty

VotS picks up the parliamentary angle of yesterday's For Want of a Minute incident.

The meta-joke here is that the reason for the brusque treatment is that there is no slack left in the schedule. In treating our collective bottom like a stocking, the fascistsProgressives pretend to watch every minute, in the name of getting the whole suppository wrapped in time to get to the mantlepiece and jam the bill where it ought not go.

---

Senator Lieberman may as well have been a man pleading for prostate cancer treatment. The presence of Senator Smalley foreshadows the coming Death Panel saying "Sorry, no budget for you. We can give you Ibuprofin."

"Thanks, no offense taken," replies a morose Joe in this hypothetical scene, "but I was taxed at a rather high rate my whole life in order to pay for this kind of thing. How is it that I've followed the rules all along, yet still come up short?"

Smalley takes on a expression blending boredom with sadness. "You know the four stages:

1. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
2. If everyone else couldn't have it, it was/is immoral to let you have it.
3. You had, therefore you must have stolen.
4. Since you were classified a thief, it was morally correct to separate you from your ill-gotten gains.

Thus, you should thank the State for having kept your foul capitalism in check these years. I shall accept your gratitude, as a representative of the State."

Lieberman, dejected: "Thanks"

Smalley, beaming: "You're welcome."

---

In all surreality, though, that minute matters not. As the recent Sanders Incident demonstrates, the Progressives care not fig #1 for anything like rules, tradition, or decorum when such do not support their foul agenda. Dingy Harry is going to plant that stocking stuffer, come hell or a Milli Vanilli record.

And it's time for me to head to work. Might as well enjoy having the job enjoy me while it lasts. But I'm blegging for FMJRA input. Spam me, ye linkers. That includes any slack-jawed crypto-Marxists who don't agree with the this blog's traditional American stance on matters. If you're one of these hate-America-first weenies that's going to go see Avatar tonight, by way of getting your masochistic fix, stop on by. Offering infantile Al Gore apologists a boot to the head is just another service we offer.

Peace, out.

Update: And, just as I Tweet this post, here is Fausta with a related offering.

Boycott Connecticut?

Just when you thought Ned Lamont Party's absurd rage against Joe Lieberman couldn't get worse -- trying to get his wife fired? "punching the guy out"? -- now Michael Moore wants liberals to boycott Connecticut?

Great. All you liberals in Connecticut, move to Vermont. And then we'll rename Connecticut "Oklahoma."

A friendly note to James Wolcott

Jeff Goldstein could kill you with his bare hands. And probably should, but I doubt he will. However, it would be unfortunate if I were to log on one day and see this top headline at Memeorandum:

MANHUNT FOR GOLDSTEIN
Police Seek Blogger in Columnist's
Brutal Dismemberment Slaying

Don't hate the player, hate the game. The viciousness of online discourse has been pondered from many perspectives, but it really comes down to the fact that people think they can say anything they want and never get their asses kicked for it.

Remember the Sparkman case? Sully was wetting his pants over "Southern populist terrorism" and Rick Ungar was screaming "Send the Body to Glenn Beck." In that atmosphere of fear-mongering pundit panic, I decided one Saturday night to try to do some actual reporting and, after a couple of calls, managed to get a law-enforcement official in Kentucky on the phone:

"You'd be surprised what some of these morons write on the Internet . . . that they wouldn't say to somebody's face," the official said in a brief telephone interview.

Exactly. I guarantee that under no circumstances would you, James Wolcott, taunt Jeff to his face. But you have no compunction about sitting there at your computer, on Conde Nast's dime, making fun of a guy you've never met and whom most of your readers never heard of.

Pretty, Popular and Vicious
This "Mean Girls" vibe is an unexpected consequence of online discourse. When I was a kid in school, I used to marvel at the way girls were always doing that evil gossip-clique thing: "You can't be her friend because she said such-and-such to so-and-so and I hate her."

Girl culture is so much more vicious than boy culture because boys are naturally prone to settle matters with their fists. The biggest boy in third grade may be an obnoxious jerk, but his superior potential for violence means that other boys are faced with a choice:

• Stay out of his way;
• Try to be his friend; or
• Form an alliance with other pipsqueaks so that if the big kid gets mad at you, he'll have to fight more than one of you.

Because girls don't routinely risk violence in their conflicts, their viciousness toward each other is unrestrained, and the clique mentality reigns in girl culture -- back-biting gossip, secret rivalries and all the rest.

Girl culture can also be described as the "culture of niceness," because popularity among girls is so largely a function of who is superficially "nice," in terms of appearance and comportment. This is why girls are so keen on fashion and grooming, whereas boys don't care about that crap. If you score the winning touchdown, nobody cares about your hairstyle.

Mean Girls in the Intelligentsia
Now, to bring this back to the blogosphere, you see an extreme example of a problem that is ubiquitous in intellectual life and more generally in "civilized" white-collar environments, where physical violence is considered an impossibility.

When a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation gets upset with a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the one outcome that can be ruled out in advance is that the Heritage guy will jump in his car, drive over to Cato, storm into the office of his antagonist and invite him out to the parking lot to settle their argument like men.

This is all for the good except that, absent the possibility of an occasional ass-kicking, denizens of the think-tank world start behaving like girls on the third-grade playground, constantly backstabbing each other and forming snobby little cliques.

Steiner's Law -- "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" -- expresses the essential bogusness of virtual discourse, where a flame-war between rival bloggers passes for a Titanic Struggle for the Soul of America, even though it's merely a collection of words posted online and read by a few thousand people in a nation of 300 million.

People don't like to be insulted and, in a real-world setting, civilized people refrain from insulting others directly -- especially if the person they're insulting is someone who might kick their ass. In the real world, Jeff Goldstein is not accustomed to being insulted and if you, James Wolcott, had ever met Goldstein, you sure as hell wouldn't be taunting him with lyrics from a Village People song.

It's extremely unlikely that Goldstein will show up on your doorstep, brandishing a blood-spattered arm -- torn from the corpse of a California Jew-hater, prior to driving cross-country to confront you -- and bellowing in murderous rage: "Wolcott, you cowardly bastard, come out here and meet your doom, or I'll kick down your door!"

Extremely unlikely, I say. But crazier things have happened.

UPDATE: Moe Lane's Quote of the Day. Moe is an easygoing, mild-mannered guy. Most people don't realize that Moe's day job is ninja warrior.

Meanwhile, one of the glories of the post-racial Obama Age is that it's once again safe for guys named "Schultz" to suggest violence against guys named "Lieberman":

What is the feeling towards Joe Lieberman? I mean how do you, you know, go into a room without punching the guy out after what he’s done to the progressive movement in this country?

Ed Schultz is speaking on behalf of the progressive movement, so he can't be held responsible if somebody actually does a beatdown on the Jew. I'm sure Joe will be deeply moved when he and Hadassah get a Happy Hannukah card from their progressive friends at MSNBC.

UPDATE II: Little Miss Attila is upset that I haven't linked her. Donald Douglas at American Power links with some vintage punk rock, and Jimmie Bise at Sundries Shack also links (but without punk rock).

Remember when liberals used to call Republicans 'mean-spirited'?

Maybe I'm the only one who remembers this, but circa 1995, it was a standard rhetorical weapon for Democrats and their media henchpeople: Newt Gingrich was an evil ogre leading a band of selfish hateful mean-spirited Republicans who were going to take turns crapping on Civil Society and wiping their butts with the Social Contract.

Seems like just yesterday, doesn't it? Now we have Harry Reid comparing health-care opponents to slaveholders and Ezra Klein accusing Joe Lieberman of mass murder, while Daily Kos and Jane Hamsher are trying to get Lieberman's wife fired.

Desperate much?

The Ned Lamont Party

Liberals are upset that Joe Lieberman will vote "no" on ObamaCare, which may be enough to block passage. Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress:

Welcome to the Lieberman Administration

And the Huffington Post:

81% Of Dems Want Lieberman Punished For Health Care Filibuster

Remember when liberals claimed that the NY23 election showed that Republicans were purging moderates? The same liberals -- who backed Ned Lamont's futile 2006 challenge to Lieberman -- now want to strip Lieberman of his Homeland Security committee chairmanship.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin wants to drive a stake through the heart of this legislative monster. She notes that Laura Ingram will speak Tuesday at a big "Code Red" rally at the Capitol.

Exit question: If the Left succeeds in turning the Democrats into the Ned Lamont Party, should conservatives turn the GOP into the Doug Hoffman Party?

Lieberman, Collins, Grassley express 'serious concern' about ITC's IG

Scored a minor scoop today from Capitol Hill:

Three senators, including Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, have sent a letter to Shara L. Aranoff, chairwoman of the International Trade Commission, expressing "serious concerns" about the contractual terms under which the ITC's inspector general is hired.
The letter, signed by Lieberman, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine -- the committee's ranking Republican -- and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), complained of the ITC's unusual practice of hiring the agency's IG under a six-month contract, which the senators suggest may undermine the watchdog's independence.

Read the whole thing. What is significant is that this is the first evidence that Lieberman's committee is willing to cooperate with Grassley, who has been bulldogging IG-Gate for nearly two months.

Impotent Netroots deny impotence

Jamie Kirchick in the New York Daily News:

Barack Obama isn't even President yet, and he's already angering some of his most devoted followers on the party's left wing. This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency.
"With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head," wrote David Sirota on the popular liberal blog OpenLeft, decrying the serial betrayals of Obama and the congressional Democratic majority. The Democratic Party, he wrote, has "faced no real retribution" for its manifold heresies, something that Sirota believes he and his band of angry bloggers must change. "We better understand why this happened," he fumed.
Allow me to provide an answer. You don't matter.

Kirchick goes on to detail the failure of left-wing bloggers to force Senate Democrats to punish their longtime nemesis, Sen. Joe Lieberman, for his support of Republican John McCain. This is evidence, Kirchick says, "that the leadership of the Democratic Party isn't as petty, vindictive and small as its left-wing supporters."

Naturally, the "petty, vindictive and small" bloggers are angry -- at Kirchick. So what do they do? Gay-baiting:

He'd be a classic Uncle Tom is he was African-American. Instead he's a very unhappy gay wingnut, a sad species indeed, forever obsessed with trying to justify his pitiful existence.

That's from a left-wing blogger whose post is headlined, "Jamie Kirchick Poops His Panties Because He Wants Attention." Exactly how is Kirchick's sexuality related to the topic at hand? Not at all. But this is how the Netroots operate, lashing out venomously at anyone who criticizes or opposes them. Tomorrow, they'll be back to bashing conservatives as "homophobes," without irony.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Tailgunner Joe Lieberman?

I've studied Joe McCarthy. I've read books about Joe McCarthy. And you, Senator, are no Joe McCarthy:

NAPITALIANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?
LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question. I know him now for a little more than three years since he came into the Senate and he’s obviously very smart and he’s a good guy. I will tell ya that during this campaign, I’ve learned some things about him, about the kind of environment from which he came ideologically. And I wouldn’t…I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.

You'd "hesitate to say he's a Marxist"? Damn it, Joe, if you're going to be part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, you'll have to learn to stop hestitating about stuff like this. Be reckless and irresponsible, like me.

Don't worry, Joe. I know you're new to this witch-hunting persecution thing, where we destroy the careers of innocent Communists by calling them Communists. You'll get the hang of it eventually.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Rushing to the defense of Obama is heroic civil libertarian Andrew Sullivan:

Bill Kristol, trained in the same politics as Hillary Clinton, now argues that Obama's remarks in a fundraiser q and a are the "real Obama" - and that his voluminous writing and speaking about the sincerity of his own religious faith, and of others, are presumably "masks." . . .
You could argue, as Kristol and others hilariously will, that Lou Dobbs has no base, that fundamentalist Christianism has no problem with "the other" in a globalized world, that dozens of state constitutional amendments banning civil marriages that had never and would never have taken place were just spirited forms of civic engagement, rather than scapegoating or politicking on resentment. You could also argue, as others legitimately will, that spasms of economic distress and social discontent are unconnected. Hey: Weimar had nothing to do with Hitler.

Uh, Andy, let me offer some etiquette advice here. Whenever you are arguing with people with names like "Lieberman" and "Kristol," it is generally considered bad form to introduce the word "Hitler" into the discourse. If they want to talk about Hitler, OK. But if you, the angry Gentile, just randomly throw "Hitler" into the argument, some people might get the wrong impression.

Just trying to help, buddy . . .

UPDATE II: I guess I should clarify that the above remark was not meant to accuse Andrew Sullivan of anti-Semitism. It's something called a "joke."

If you have to explain a joke, it ruins the joke, but I'll go ahead and ruin it, rather than be misunderstood:

• This blog post began with a link to a Think Progress post in which Joe Lieberman is accused of red-baiting Barack Obama.
• Then, I mocked the accusation against Lieberman with various references to the career of famed anti-communist Sen. Joe McCarthy. (I've interviewed two McCarthy biographers, Arthur Herman and Stan Evans.)
• Self-deprecating humor was employed by urging Lieberman to "be reckless and irresponsible, like me."
• Then, after clicking over to Memeorandum to see if my post was linked, I noticed Sullivan's post, which included a non sequitur Hitler/Weimar reference.
• Knowing Sullivan to be a critic of neocons, it occurred to me that his introduction of Hitler to the argument might be misconstrued as one of those anti-Semitic digs to which some anti-neocons occasionally resort.
• Thus, I offered my "etiquette advice," pointing out a true fact of etiquette -- that one should not introduce to conversation a topic known to be painful or offensive to others -- and suggested the possibility that "some people might get the wrong impression," i.e., that Sullivan might be accused of anti-Semitism.
• This adds new layers of self-referential humor to the post, since (a) I'm not exactly known as the most tactful and sensitive person on the planet, and (b) I've also had personal experience with thoughtless remarks that gave "some people . . . the wrong impression."

So, a joke ruined, but a misunderstanding avoided.