Ned Lamont is not ‘Karl Rove’s dream come true’

So Cokie the Nice Polite Republican says it would be a disaster because moving the Democrats “to the left” will lead to partisanship. God knows there’s none of that on the other side of the aisle.

Here’s Cokie the Shill in October of 2004: “I think if George Bush could go around the country and meet 290 million Americans, he could win”

In 2004, Bush wouldn’t get near anyone who wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath beforehand.

BTW, her real name is Martha Mary Coreen Morrison Claiborne Boggs Roberts.

What utter assholes these “pundits” have become. They just don’t get it, do they? No one who matters anymore cares what they proclaim and pontificate these days. They’re nothing but pre-blog has-beens.

Reminds me of a poem one of my students wrote back in the ’70s. I no longer have it, but it was about picking some flowers outside his apartment building and stuffing them in an empty coffee can to brighten his kitchen, how beautiful they looked amid the squalor. The lines I do remember form the conclusion: “They didn’t know they were dead. / Not for days.”

I am against the war, but the broad conventional wisdom is to run to the middle in general election. So, the further to the left the dem nominee is, the better the chances for the repubs. I’d say the further conventional wisdom is that an “anti-war” candidate looks weak on national security, and the extent to which the dems can be strong on national security, we pick up seats. That’s not the craziest idea in the world. If you accept that premise, Karl Rove would like us to appear weak on national security. So I don’t get the “this is the nuttiest analysis in the world” routine. Is it a perfect analysis? Do I even agree with it? No to both, but I’d like a discussion on why it’s wrong, rather than a “those goofballs” ad hominen attack

I’ve never felt better about cancelling my subscription to TNR a couple years ago. Peretz and Beinart turned a once-great liberal magazine into a piece of shit. If Lieberman loses, they’ll probably just close up shop.

Are all of these conservatives anxious to help the Democratic Party?

Obviously conservatives must believe that what’s good for the Democratic Party is good for America.

Jeebus Christ. Joe has had 3 terms in the senate. The pundits bitch and moan about the power of incumbency, but when an incumbent close to them that they like is threatened by the practice of democracy, its the end of the world. Frankly, I wish every damn senator up there had as real a race on their hands as Joe does. Both parties are full of dead wood that needs pruning. The whole damn senate is accountable for Iraq, even those who voted against the war resolution.

That’s the first step on the road to war crimes.

No, doubtful. The first step on the road to war crimes was electing Bush. Getting sane people elected is the first step on the road to war crimes trials.

“The whole damn senate is accountable for Iraq, even those who voted against the war resolution.”

So you would argue that even Feingold, one of the few senators to consistently oppose the Iraq war, is responsible for our current plight? And you wonder why people get defensive and stop listening to your arguments…

I haven’t followed this race as closely as I could have, but from what I understand, regardless of which Democrat wins the primary, a Democrat will win the General Election. If that’s true, then the Republicans would rather have Old Joe than someone new who might have balls.

Lamont scares the hell out of them because he stands to show the way for other liberal Dems. The GOP cannot handle Democrats who fight back right now, as Murtha has shown. They know that if Americans see any sign at all that the Dems have grown a set of balls, the GOP will be cooked.

PS

Note how the coporate media played up Joe’s formal Iraq apologia.

Note the way the gap between the two candidates closed almost immediately.

Note that the corporate media hasn’t given Lamont equal time and equal billing to respond.

Note that this is the way you control things without appearing to control things…

“A Quinnipiac poll released today showed the race narrowing in the 11th hour. Lamont still leads, but the margin is now 51% to 45%.”

Uh-oh.

I have a long story from my career as an executive in the corporate world that I’d love to tell. Fortunately, you’ll be spared, because there’s a compelling moral to an old fable that will do just as well: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

Because sometimes they don’t. Like our last Fitzmas party celebration.

Please share with your friends in Ct.

Joe Lieberman’s Desperate Measures
by John Nichols

Joe Lieberman, down in the polls and desperate as Tuesday’s Connecticut Senate primary approaches, tried on Sunday to remake himself as something he has not been for a very long time: A true-blue Democrat who respects dissent in his own party and the country as a whole.

Accusing his anti-war primary challenger, Ned Lamont, of waging “a distortion campaign against me,” the Bush administration’s favorite Democratic senator grumbled, “Now I understand that many Democrats in Connecticut disagree with me and are very angry about the war. I don’t think there is anything I can say to change your mind about whether we should have gone to war or when we should bring the troops home, and at this point I’m not going to insult you by trying. What I will say is this: I not only respect your right to disagree or question the President, I value it. I was part of the anti-war movement in the late 1960s, so I don’t need to be lectured by Ned Lamont about the place of dissent in our democracy.”

With the primary just two days away, the senator professed to be shocked, shocked by suggestions that he might be something less than a diehard Democrat.

“The more I have talked to voters in these closing days, the more I am concerned they have been shortchanged in this campaign,” said Lieberman. “Instead of hearing an honest debate about the issues that really matter to people, they have been overwhelmed with bogus charges about my Democratic credentials. Instead of having an honest discussion about your future, we’re getting negative politics at its worst.”

The new Democratic Joe Lieberman is a far cry from the Joe Lieberman who has spent the past four years as the pet Democrat of the conservative Fox News combine — grinning, nodding and chirping his approval as conservative commentator Sean Hannity has trashed war critics and accused Democrats who challenge the Bush White House of something akin to treason.

Consider this sample from the transcipt of a February 10, 2006, appearance by Lieberman on Hannity’s radio program:

HANNITY: I agree with you, and Senator, this is why I am very appreciative of the positions you’ve taken in the war on terror in the last number of years. And I know you’ve taken a lot of political heat from it from within your party. You’ve heard of Howard Dean’s comments about you, for crying out loud.

LIEBERMAN: (Laughter)

HANNITY: I mean he could barely come out and support you. And, you know, Karl Rove said that Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview, and he said, it doesn’t make them unpatriotic, but it makes them wrong.

LIEBERMAN: Yeah.

HANNITY: He believes, profoundly consistently wrong. And I think the latest example of this is, we can kill members of Al Qaeda, but we’ve got Democrats up in arms over the idea that if Al Qaeda calls into the United States from an outside country, that, boy, we’d better get a court order to listen to them. It’s absurd to me.

LIEBERMAN: Yeah…

In the course of the same program last winter, Hannity offered to campaign for Lieberman, telling the neoconservative senator: “If you ever want me to do anything, for you and your re-election, I think we ought to have Conservatives for Lieberman, a big fundraiser in Connecticut, and if I could ever do that, I’d make it the biggest blowout celebration ever.”

Lieberman responded by thanking Hannity and telling the Fox personality: “You’re a great guy. It would just be fun to be with you.”

Perhaps even more amusing than the sudden sympathy for Democrats and dissenters displayed by Lieberman in his pre-primary speech was his newfound anger over the stolen election of 2000.

“I am the only Democrat in America to run against George Bush in a national election twice,” said Lieberman, referencing his 2000 Democratic campaign for the vice presidency and his miserable 2004 run for the party’s presidential nod. “I even beat him and Dick Cheney once, if all the votes had been counted.”

The senator’s right, of course. Al Gore would have become the president, and Lieberman the vice president, if all the votes in Florida had been counted in December, 2000, with an eye toward producing a result that reflected the sentiments of the electorate. But what Lieberman failed to mention on Sunday was that he has, for years, been Joey-on-the-spot when George W. Bush has needed an election ally.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, vice presidential candidate Lieberman parted company with his running mate to tell the Wall Street Journal that Gore’s populist rhetoric wasn’t sincere. Don’t take Gore seriously, Lieberman promised, Democrats could be counted on to deliver for corporate America.

During the Florida recount fight of that year, Lieberman told Democrats to back off their challenges to Republican efforts to count votes that were cast late or illegally.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, after Democrats had overwhelmingly rejected Lieberman’s candidacy for their party’s nomination, the senator traveled to the battleground state of Florida three weeks before the election and told a predominantly Jewish crowd in Delray Beach that criticism of Bush’s Middle East policies were “unjustified.” “We are dealing with a president who’s had a record of strong, consistent support for Israel,” Lieberman argued. “You can’t say otherwise.”

It is not surprising that Joe Lieberman waited until the end of this summer’s Connecticut primary campaign to complain about “bogus charges about my Democratic credentials.” He’s hoping that no one has time to check out the charges before election day. If they do, they will find that there is nothing “bogus” about the Lamont campaign’s detailing of Lieberman’s penchant for carrying water for Bush and the neoconservatives.

Joe Lieberman is hoping that Connecticut Democrats won’t recall his record when the vote on Tuesday.

If they do, he’s as doomed as the polls suggest.

From the above transcript…

Lieberman:

“I am the only Democrat in America to run against George Bush in a national election twice,” said Lieberman, referencing his 2000 Democratic campaign for the vice presidency and his miserable 2004 run for the party’s presidential nod. “I even beat him and Dick Cheney once, if all the votes had been counted.”

So why weren’t you screaming that from roof tops in 2000?
Why did you cave in?
Was it for the “good” of the country?

What a fatuous hoary phony.

Off with your head…
Off with your head…
Off with your head…

I agree with Frak. Cokie Roberts is the personification of DC Establishment. Her opinions are an irrelevent blend of lazy conventional wisdom and wishful thinking. None of these “wise” pundits are ever required to define what “the Left” is. My guess is that it is anything that rocks or even threatens to rock that cozy little boat that is the USS Beltway. I give that “has-been” Sam Donaldson some credit for calling Cokie on her BS conclusion that “the base” (you know, that thing carefully cultivated and fed and reveared by Republicans and “excused” and reviled by Democrats) is the only part of the populace that is opposed to Bush’s little crap festival in Iraq. Cokie wishes that everyone who is not one of the DC chosen would simply STFU. Oh! It will be so chaotic if someone can be turned out of office simply for ignoring the views of his constituents. Heaven forend! Can’t we all just get along? Gawd, this ticks me off. Establishment DC (and publications like TNR) supported the invasion of Iraq, and they seem incapable of admitting that those who did not were right. It does not matter whether a person was against the war from Day 1 (many readers of this Blog) or were merely ambivilent /suspicious of it and then appalled to see the reasons for the war repudiated and changed and repudiated again as the total lack of competence in the civilian leadership at the Pentagon became frightenly clear (me). All are assumed to be wild-eyed anarchists who want to turn every quiet cul-de-sac into a commune. When it comes to assessing those who hope for Joe Lieberman’s defeat, the punditocracy are remarkably incurious. This country – let alone the Democratic Party – could stand some leftward movement. Cokie, grab your smelling salts and go out and talk with Lamont supporters. It may just surprise you to find out they are not as wild-eyed and filled with hate and anger as you seem to fear. Otherwise, do us all a big favor and retire.

There is nothing in Roberts’ nor Peretz’s comment that make them any wiser than any other poster here. I don’t recall someone dying and making them God. This is why professional opinionators hate the blogs so much: we can guess just as well as they can.

What does Lamont’s challenge to Joe mean? In this “accountability moment” for Lieberman, Ned is sticking his personal neck out to honestly challenge Joe on his record. That’s a disaster for no one other than Lieberman himself. If Joe does make it back to office after all this hoopla and continues on his old “I’m the decider and screw what my constituents say” persona, then we have a bona fide tragedy for this whole nation.

but the broad conventional wisdom is to run to the middle in general election. So, the further to the left the dem nominee is, the better the chances for the repubs.

Dave, the mistake in your analysis IMO is assuming that the candidate supported by Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc. is a moderate, while the candidate whose anti-Iraq-war views correspond with over 60% of the country is an extremist. This is Connecticut, the center is not where it would be in a state like Alabama or Idaho.