The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy
By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss with Connecticut Correspondent Dink Stover in New Haven
Former Senator Joe Lieberman (Likud – Conn.) finally made a contribution to American political life.
He died.
To his dying day he was a force for bad, whether by shilling for a bloody gruesome war of lies in Iraq, blocking public option health care to protect the profits of the useless private insurance industry, or, at the end, working to destroy what's left of American democracy by shilling for a preposterous “No Labels” vanity bomb candidate to ensure the election of the Tangerine-Faced Rap(c)ist.
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| Thank you, Joe Lieberman... |
None of that mattered to the usual suspects who couldn't wait to salute Lieberman the brightest light of bipartisan “moderation.” That supposedly sterling quality revealed itself on any number of occasions. Including 2008, when, despite his long career in Democratic politics, he endorsed John McCain and Sarah Palin over Barack Obama, due in part to McCain's and Lieberman's shared love of starting pointless foreign wars and impugning the patriotism, character, and intellect of anyone who thought otherwise.
He would have toiled away in relative obscurity as a Senator from Connecticut (that's south of here) had not Bill Clinton enlisted twentysomething White House intern Monica Lewinsky in a bit of West Wing rocket-polishing. Lieberman led the tut-tutting. When Al Gore won the 2000 nomination, he decided to put Lieberman on the ticket to cleanse the Clinton stain.
Lieberman was hardly an adornment to the ticket, losing a debate to, wait for it, Dick Cheney. After his ticket won the popular vote but lost Florida by 487 votes in the initial count, Lieberman's whiny equivocating undermined Democratic efforts to take a hard line against George Bush's election thievery. Nonetheless, Lieberman had the temerity to claim at his obituary interview in 2023 that the Supreme Court's awarding of the election to Bush was a travesty of justice.
Gee, was there any other time that this pillar of principle might have spoken out? Like during the recount itself when he insisted that illegal ballots should be counted if they came from soldiers? Or in the aftermath of the Court's law-free decision?
Fortunately (for him, not for the country), he was able to resume his Senate seat just in time to play a huge role in the Republican campaign to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, thereby wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives and crippling thousands more for no purpose whatsoever.
During those sorry years, Lieberman's droning voice was an inescapable presence on the Sunday gabfests, where he could be counted on to slap a bipartisan veneer on insane Republican talking points.
Lieberman got a free pass until he colluded with George Bush and Dick Cheney in their mendacious effort to start a war with Iraq on the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction (Iraq had none) and links to 9/11 terrorists (also none).
He supported the pointless, gruesome, lie-based Iraq War from the get-go. His support never wavered, even when the dimensions of the catastrophe, including the massive human rights abuses, were clear to even the meanest intelligence. In 2006, he declared that the US was on the road to success as the war raged; in 2008, he supported keeping more U.S. troops mired in Iraq longer (the infamous “surge”), a squandering of American blood and treasure that did nothing other than ensure that responsibility for ending the disastrous escapade would fall to Barack Obama. G. Mitchell, So Wrong for So Long 153, 217.
He even decided that he could ride the Iraq debacle into the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004. After Democrats told Bombs Away Joe to sod off, and then refused to renominate him for his Senate seat in 2006, Joe nursed a grudge against Democrats that never went away.
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| ...or should we say todah rabah? |
After supporting McCain and Palin in 2008, he turned to undercutting Obama's bold health care plan. As the crucial 60th vote for Senate approval of Obamacare, Lieberman refused to vote for a health care plan that would go on to save thousands of lives and provide coverage to millions who had formerly been uninsured unless it was sabotaged to protect the profits of useless private insurance companies.
By opposing the “public option” that would have allowed consumers to buy health care from a public non-profit cooperative, Lieberman stoutly defended the interests of health insurers (many headquartered by remarkable coincidence in Connecticut) over the public interest in getting the best coverage at the lowest cost. If private companies were so wonderfully efficient, why would they fear competition from a nonprofit competitor, you may ask? He even sank Harry Reid's watered down compromise limiting the nonprofit option to those 55 and over.
Thanks to Joe, millions of Americans today are overpaying for health insurance to protect the profits of the health insurance oligopoly. Another todah rabah!
He continued his crusade against everything right and decent in American politics until his last breath. With the connivance of his weird angry hard-right pollster and shill, Mark “Lumpy” Penn '75, he campaigned recently for a “No Labels” candidate who would run against Trump and Biden and lose to Trump. Even though every decent human being turned him down (although indecent heroin-addled lunatic Bobby Kennedy Jr. '76 thought he'd try to ensure Trump's re-election with his own vanity bomb campaign), Lieberman kept at it:
At almost every major turn, Lieberman served as the group’s chief public defender. He was also a private force in No Labels’ presidential recruitment push. He insisted repeatedly in interviews, as recently as last week, that the nation is craving an alternative to Trump and President Joe Biden. “This is the moment for a bipartisan unity ticket,” Lieberman told Bloomberg Television last Thursday. “Now, we’ve just got to find a strong bipartisan ticket to recommend to the No Labels delegates in the next couple of weeks. That’s not easy.”
Look at it this way, Joe: it won't be any harder just because you're dead.
But we can't leave old Joe to his eternal reward without noting one attribute that he always attached to himself which appeared prominently in his obituaries:
He supported Israel and called himself an “observant” Jew but not an Orthodox one because he did not follow strict Orthodox practices. His family kept a kosher home and attended Sabbath services. To avoid conveyances on a Sabbath, he once walked across town to the Capitol to block a Republican filibuster after attending services in Georgetown.
Many Democrats criticized Mr. Lieberman’s support for the war in Iraq, but admirers said his strengths with voters lay in his rectitude, his religious faith and his willingness to compromise.
If you want to be an Orthodox Jew, be our guest if it's meaningful to you, although don't preen about how you observe some of the Sabbath commandments but not the one about abstaining from work, even if that work is only conniving in the Senate or preparing for your 900th appearance on Meet the Press.
More fundamentally, strict observance of 613 mitzvot doesn't excuse you from your duty as Jew of tikkun olam: to heal and repair this world. That's why no one who really follows the Tanakh could support the brutal death of hundreds of thousands for no reason in Iraq, protect the profits of insurance companies over the lives of those in need of health care, or connive to ensure the election of a depraved corrupt bigoted criminal whose every thought, word, and deed contravenes Jewish ethical teaching.
If you have any doubt as to Lieberman's devotion to everything appalling and rotten in American politics over the last thirty years, we can set your mind at ease. The Republican apparatchik who has captured the hearts and minds of his editors and owners at The New York Times had this to say about Lieberman:
He must have said other stupid things too in the course of his two-minute read, but those two minutes were too precious to us to waste.
Anyway it's not our job to shill for Bretbug. That's what Gail Collins is for.
A lot of the fawning obits for this guy glossed over his terrible policy positions and his efforts to destroy the Democratic Party by referring to him as a mensch. Examples of his menschlichkeit are somewhat harder to come by. A mensch fights for the right things, like justice here and peace around the world. A mensch certainly doesn't do anything that helps a corrupt subversive indicted Russian-owned racist and sex offender return to power. As far as we can tell, the only thing Joe Lieberman ever fought for was Joe Lieberman.
The more accurate term to describe such an individual is a schmuck.
At best.
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