As usual Joe Lieberman is wrong

By Ron Beasley

Joe Lieberman like Bill Kristol and the entire Bush administration has been wrong about everything.  That didn't prevent him from taking the Democrats to task on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  Today Senator Joe Biden does a good job of taking Mr Lieberman to task on those same pages.

On Wednesday, Joe Lieberman wrote on this page that the Democratic Party he and I grew up in has drifted far from the foreign policy espoused by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

In fact, it is the policies that President George W. Bush has pursued, and that John McCain would continue, that are divorced from that great tradition � and from the legacy of Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush's reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.

The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead � by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests � Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

But it's Joe Conason who really explains what Joe Lieberman is all about in Joe Lieberman, ideological turncoat.

Despite his boundless pretensions, Sen. Joe Lieberman is not and has never been a font of foreign policy wisdom. His opinions derive as much from expedience and vanity as any consistent worldview. He will say whatever serves his ambitions at a given moment.

Running against antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont almost two years ago, for instance, he promised Connecticut voters that we were on the cusp of victory in Iraq. "I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops," he said in October 2006, "and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home." Within weeks after winning that election, of course, Lieberman was joining with Sen. John McCain, his friend and ideological ally, in support of sending 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq -- and bringing exactly none home.

Was he lying when he offered that false but comforting assurance in the heat of a Senate campaign? Was he simply unable to distinguish between reality and his own propaganda? A similar set of questions confronted readers of a Lieberman essay on foreign policy and the Democrats that appeared Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, where we can expect the "independent Democrat" to appear often during the coming months as a turncoat surrogate for McCain -- because today he evidently hopes for appointment as a token Democrat in a Republican Cabinet, or even a second nomination as vice president, on the Republican ticket.

Lieberman's theme in the Journal essay, excerpted from a speech he delivered at an event sponsored by Commentary magazine, the leading neoconservative journal, is easily summarized and utterly unoriginal: Democrats were once patriotic and strong on defense, when Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy led the party, but they have lapsed (again) into weakness and vacillation during the Bush era. And Lieberman pillories Barack Obama for suggesting that he would sit down and talk with the leaders of Iran and other adversarial regimes and for failing to stand up to the party's overbearing liberal wing.

For someone who once considered himself a history scholar, Lieberman shamelessly falsifies not only the diplomacy of past and current administrations but also, by omission, his own political pedigree. His Journal essay opens with a lament about the condition of the Democratic Party and an idealized glance back at the "principled, internationalist, strong and successful" foreign policy of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman.

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The Democrats have struggled over foreign policy since Vietnam, although Lieberman's indictment of a party that abandoned the president after 9/11 is just as dishonest as his failure to discuss his own evolution. Democrats stood in lock step with Bush when he invaded Afghanistan, and only began to break with him over Iraq, a ruinous war that was based on lies.

As for his complaint against Obama's willingness to engage with various dictators and despots, let's not forget that American leaders have done so whenever that suited their objectives -- whether secretly, as Ronald Reagan did with Iran, or openly, as George W. Bush has done with Kim Jong Il and Moammar Gadhafi.

But speaking of appeasement, nobody in this debate, including Obama, has ever praised Louis Farrakhan as unctuously as Lieberman did in 2000. Back then, when he was trying to win black votes, he said he looked forward to sitting down with the Nation of Islam leader -- and he set no conditions for that meeting.

Maybe John McCain should renounce Lieberman's support, too.

Joe Lieberman left the Democratic party  at a time it was ascending and joined with the neocons when their stock was plunging.  He knows full well he will have no power in the Democratic controlled Senate and his only hope to hold on to some relevancy is a McCain win and a place in his cabinet.