“Joe Drifts Away”: Lieberman’s Misguided Causes Lead To A Career That Descended Into Incoherence
David Lightman, who spent nearly two decades covering Joe Lieberman when he was with the Hartford Courant, pens a fairly long farewell to the retiring heresiarch, with this nut graph:
He exits as a voice often without an echo, an independent without a comfortable spot in either political party, a man in the middle of a political system that prizes partisanship over moderation.
Well, that’s the nice way to put it. Here’s how I explained it in a TDS post when Lieberman announced his retirement early last year:
Lieberman’s trajectory since his appearance on the Democratic ticket in 2000 has been in the steady direction of representing traditions he’s misinterpreted, and constituencies that no longer exist. It was fitting that when he crossed every line of political propriety and endorsed the Republican ticket in 2008, he embraced his friend John McCain precisely when McCain was reinventing his own political identity at the behest of the conservative movement, which in turn vetoed Lieberman as a possible running-mate.
I’ve never been a Lieberman-hater like a lot of progressive bloggers (though I did recommend he get booted out of the Senate Democratic Caucus after his endorsement of McCain), and remain gratified by his late renaissance in helping repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. But treating the man as a victim of polarization is just wrong. He went his own way, repeatedly and deliberately, beginning with his more-Catholic-than-the-Pope advocacy of the Iraq War, intensifying with his refusal to respect the decision of Connecticut Democrats to deny him renomination in 2006, and then culminating in the McCain endorsement, which violated basic rules of political loyalty that existed long before the current era of polarization. If he was isolated, he was self-isolated, and he was never “independent” of the varying and mostly misguided causes he chose to embrace as his career descended into incoherence.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 4, 2013
“Looking For America”: We’re Doing This To Ourselves Because We Don’t Know Who We Are Anymore
“I’m sorry,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, her voice breaking. “I’m having a really tough time.”
She’s the former nurse from Long Island who ran for Congress in 1996 as a crusader against gun violence after her husband and son were victims of a mass shooting on a commuter train. On Friday morning, McCarthy said, she began her day by giving an interview to a journalist who was writing a general story about “how victims feel when a tragedy happens.”
“And then 15 minutes later, a tragedy happens.”
McCarthy, whose husband died and son was critically wounded, is by now a practiced hand at speaking out when a deranged man with a lot of firepower runs amok. But the slaughter of 20 small children and seven adults in Connecticut left her choked up and speechless.
“I just don’t know what this country’s coming to. I don’t know who we are any more,” she said.
President Obama was overwhelmed as well, when he attempted to comfort the nation. It was his third such address in the wake of a soul-wrenching mass shooting. “They had their entire lives ahead of them,” he said, and he had trouble saying anything more.
It was, of course, a tragedy. Yet tragedies happen all the time. Terrible storms strike. Cars crash. Random violence occurs. As long as we’re human, we’ll never be invulnerable.
But when a gunman takes out kindergartners in a bucolic Connecticut suburb, three days after a gunman shot up a mall in Oregon, in the same year as fatal mass shootings in Minneapolis, in Tulsa, in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, in a theater in Colorado, a coffee bar in Seattle and a college in California — then we’re doing this to ourselves.
We know the story. The shooter is a man, usually a young man, often with a history of mental illness. Sometimes in a rage over a lost job, sometimes just completely unhinged. In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the air was full of experts discussing the importance of psychological counseling. “We need to look at what drives a crazy person to do these kind of actions,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the House.
Every country has a sizable contingent of mentally ill citizens. We’re the one that gives them the technological power to play god.
This is all about guns — access to guns and the ever-increasing firepower of guns. Over the past few years we’ve seen one shooting after another in which the killer was wielding weapons holding 30, 50, 100 bullets. I’m tired of hearing fellow citizens argue that you need that kind of firepower because it’s a pain to reload when you’re shooting clay pigeons. Or that the founding fathers specifically wanted to make sure Americans retained their right to carry rifles capable of mowing down dozens of people in a couple of minutes.
Recently the Michigan House of Representatives passed and sent to the governor a bill that, among other things, makes it easy for people to carry concealed weapons in schools. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday, a spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger said that it might have meant “the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders.” This is a popular theory of civic self-defense that discounts endless evidence that in a sudden crisis, civilians with guns either fail to respond or respond by firing at the wrong target.
It was perhaps the second-most awful remark on one of the worst days in American history, coming up behind Mike Huckabee’s asking that since prayer is banned from public schools, “should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”
We will undoubtedly have arguments about whether tougher regulation on gun sales or extra bullet capacity would have made a difference in Connecticut. In a way it doesn’t matter. America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. We have come to regard ourselves — and the world has come to regard us — as a country that’s so gun happy that the right to traffic freely in the most obscene quantities of weapons is regarded as far more precious than an American’s right to health care or a good education.
We have to make ourselves better. Otherwise, the story from Connecticut is too unspeakable to bear.
Nearly two years ago, after Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head in a mass shooting in Arizona, the White House sent up signals that Obama was preparing to do something. “I wouldn’t rule out that at some point the president talks about the issues surrounding gun violence,” said his press secretary at the time, Robert Gibbs.
On Friday, the president said: “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”
Time passes. And here we are.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 14, 2012
“Crazy Idea”: Laws To Encourage Voting
Connecticut has taken the lead in proposing measures to increase voter turnout by—get this—making it easier to vote.
Voter ID laws have been all the rage around the country, with conservative lawmakers pushing to make it harder to vote, often by requiring some form of government-issued photo identification. The goal, at least according to rhetoric, is to keep the process safe from fraud—despite there being no real evidence of in-person voter fraud, the only kind such laws would actually prevent. In the meantime, states struggle with low-turnout rates and sometimes low registration rates. In Texas, which recently passed one of the more stringent ID requirements, residents vote at among the lowest rates in the country.
All of which makes Connecticut’s current voting debate somewhat shocking by comparison. The secretary of state has taken the lead in proposing measures to increase voter turnout by—get this—making it easier to vote. Two proposals make it easier to register by offering same-day registration for those who show up on Election Day and creating an online voter registration system so people can do it from home. Another measure would increase penalties for voter intimidation. According to officials, the efforts are much-needed to increase turnout. As the Hartford Courant reports:
“It’s long past time that we move our elections into the 21st century in Connecticut,” Secretary of the State Denise Merrill said during a press briefing Friday prior to a legislative hearing on the proposals. “We are not on the cutting edge and our system is old, costly and inconvenient.”
As a result, Merrill said, one out of three state residents who are eligible to vote aren’t even registered.
Voting, most of us can all agree, is a good thing to do. But legislation around voting has become largely about partisan advantage—voter ID laws are seen to give Republicans an advantage because the impact would be particularly felt in poor and minority communities, both largely Democratic constituencies. Not shockingly, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the American Legislative Exchange Council, a meeting place for corporate interests and conservative lawmakers, has helped bolster the efforts to pass voter ID laws around the country—presumably because ALEC hopes to see more conservatives get into office. Meanwhile Democrats argue voter ID laws decrease access and function like a poll tax, as a way of making it harder for certain communities to vote.
The Courant article shows the same cynicism comes at efforts to increase voting—since those efforts will likely benefit Democrats. One Republican asks why there’s a need for these laws and worries about devaluing the ballot box if access is too easy. Politicians are rarely angels, and it’s likely both sides take an interest at least in part because they hope for political gain.
But that’s largely beside the point. American citizens, regardless of political affiliation, have the right to vote. Increasing access to that right is important; in the secular religion of democracy, voting is practically a holy act. While the efforts to increase turnout in Connecticut may benefit Democrats, that doesn’t change that it benefits the democratic process as well.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 6, 2012
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