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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Stipulated: Joe Lieberman Is A Putz 

...ok, so that probably isn't a stipulation that falls into the category of "Breaking News", but this Politico report reinforces any impression that any reasonable person may have regarding Lieberman's total abandonment of any pretense of actual concern for the plight of any real people. It's been pretty clear since his reelection that his primary goal in life was to be a jerk to Democrats as a form of personal retribution. Essentially, Lieberman has sacrificed his Constitutional responsibility of representation, as well as the well-being of his constituents, on the alter of his own bruised ego. We already knew that simply because we didn't see him fleeing across the parking lot to avoid any suggestion that he would even tolerate being in the same room as a proposal that he serve as John McCain's running mate in 2008, but the hits just seem to keep on coming...

The Politico story merely is the most recent crumbling brick in that slimy wall of lies that is part of the political house in which Joe Lieberman lives. Of Course he wrote a personal letter to Harry Reid; all the better to preserve his personal options. Of Course he didn't come right out in the letter stating that he would oppose the Medicare plan; that would tip the hand he fully intended to play. Lieberman had no interest other than flexing his own muscle for the sole purpose of showing those Democrat bastards who turned their backs on him in his hour of need just exactly who is the boss around here, which is why even the most sympathetic treatment he could hope to get - from Politico - clearly demonstrates that entire rooms full of Democratic legislators and staffers were unable to gather from either his statements or his conveniently-produced "confidential" letter that he actually had deal-stopper concerns about aspects of the Senate Health Care Reform bill prior to his star turn on a Sunday talk show...

Timing is everything. Lieberman wrote a letter; if he was smart - and he clearly is - he made sure that it was an official hard-copy correspondence rather than an email, which guaranteed that Harry Reid probably wouldn't even see it before Lieberman strolled onto the "Face The Nation" set to fire an unexpected four-torpedo spread into the deal Reid thought he had agreement on. It's a move that the most skilled Mafia hitman would have to sit back and admire for its shear audacity: compose a "personal and confidential" letter expressing views that are totally contradictory to any viewpoint you have previously shared with Senate leadership; run it through your staff system so it takes all day to get it completed but is still dated Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009; make sure that it isn't delivered either electronically or by hard copy until sometime later in the day of Friday, Dec. 11, when the Majority Leader's office is powering down for the weekend and can't respond immediately; plaster your own face all over the TV on Sunday pulling the plug on Health Care legislation in its then-current form, comfortable in the knowledge that you created a CYA 'get out of jail free' document that you can wave around to 'prove' your sincerity and 'timely' objection, even though that whole thing is a total sham because nobody had the chance to address or even respond to the concerns raised in your cleverly useless letter...

To be honest, Lieberman didn't play all that smartly clever a game, as far as the 'inside baseball' aspect of this story is concerned. He did, however, lay down a paper trail to roll out before his electoral constituents (the people of Connecticut) and his natural constituents (beady-eyed weasels everywhere). That paper trail is most likely bogus, as far as any sort of reality-based community is concerned, but Joe Lieberman is a putz. When you're a putz, connections to actual reality don't matter...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:22 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 11, 2010

The Trent Lott Problem 

...much is being made about the reported comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid concerning Barack Obama that is found in the Mark Halperin/John Heilemann book about the 2008 presidential campaign. On the face of it, his notation of Obama's lack of a "Negro dialect" ("unless he chooses to have one") has a certain taint of racial insensitivity, but it is probably just simply the product of a clumsy choice of words by an old white guy from a lily-white state who didn't have sufficient staff support to keep him sufficiently up to speed on latter-day nomenclature to steer him clear of the sort of statements that that have plunged him into the crisis of leadership in which he now finds himself...

There is a huge outcry now, primarily from Republicans, that is attempting to draw a direct parallel to the trouble that Trent Lott found himself in back in 2002 that finally led him to resign as Senate Majority leader...and that is the Trent Lott Problem...

Lott may in fact have a racist bone or two in his body - I don't have any evidence to argue one way or another on that point, other than his voting record - but it has always seemed to me that his comments at Strom Thurmond's ninety-somethingth birthday party about how we'd all be better off had he been elected president when he ran for the office was little more than a casual unthinking off-the-cuff bit of homage to a Grand Old Man of the Party and not an affirmation of Thurmond's segregation party platform. Even though I would not have had a single qualm in 2002 about supporting any sort of proposal to set Lott adrift on an iceberg for the sake and survival of the nation, it seemed to me that he was quite simply getting railroaded straight out of town over comments that were made outside of any sort of historical context and were simply pretty words offered in homage to an old man. As it so happens, I was on the wrong side of the 'equal sign' on the Lott/Thurmond issue - for reasons that I don't actually understand and will probably never accept - and poor ol' Trent had to walk the plank over his comments...

As a result of all that past history, we find ourselves fetched up against the shoals that we are trapped against today. Harry Reid said things that were stupidly insensitive (but not necessarily surprising) that are being compared to Trent Lott's comments back in the dayp, which were themselves stupid and insensitive to people of color, whether or not either man realized it. Lott lost track of - or perhaps never really understood - what Thurmond was all about, and that is a different place than the one in which Reid found himself in when he said what he said. That is where the Trent Lott problem lives for Democrats and for Reid, however, because both episodes live at one margin or another of what we understand as race relationships. Reid's commments in that context are nothing compared to Lott's comments, but both have the taint of racism...

Hence the Trent Lott Problem; what Reid said lives in an entirely different plane than the potential meaning behind what Lott said (regardless of what Lott actually meant), but there appears to be a moment of equivalency in the world of political media. So, for the near future, we will be hammered with one version or another of the question "when will Harry Reid resign from leadership like Trent Lott was forced to?", regardless of whether or not we are actually talking about the same thing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:49 PM 0 comments

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