Tuesday, August 5, 2008

In other news: Does Joe Lieberman think he's just that good?

I just have to ask myself, after watching Joe Lieberman explain on Meet the press this week how, if he spoke at the GOP convention he was "And frankly, I'm going to go to a partisan convention and tell them, if I go, why it's so important that we start to act like Americans and not as, as partisan mudslingers here in Washington."

Really Joe?

Since the great GOP revolution in 1980, the Republican Philosophy has been that you don't simply beat Democrats in the polls.

You destroy them.

You lie about them releasing rapists.

You pursue impeachment charges for personal failings.

You photoshop them with Osama Bin Laden.

You grant huge amounts of money to swiftboat them.

You generate fear by manipulating homeland security levels to make people think a terrorist attack is imminent.

Rather than compromise a single whit, you threaten to 'go nuclear' and rewrite the senate rules mid-session to eliminate the filibuster. (And by the way - wouldn't life be so much easier now if the Dems had stood firm and *let* them? Instead we now have a media that takes it as a given that when Democrats are in charge, it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate, and when Republicans are in charge Democrats are routinely blocking bipartisan compromise by filibustering legislation that should easily pass with the required 51 votes.)

You explain to Lobbyists that, if they want to work with you, they will give *no* support to the Democratic Party. None - don't hire Dems, don't talk to them, *nothing*. And you bloody well keep them in line on that too.

Basically - sometimes explicitly sometimes not, the GOP plan has been to destroy Dems, burn them out, shoot the escapees, and salt the land they lived on as a warning to the next ten generations.

And Joe Lieberman is going to sell them on the glories of Bi-Partisanship? Seriously?

No wonder the Republican Party thinks Democrats will sell out everything to talk to the enemies of the United States - the ones they talk to keep coming back to the table no matter how many times the GOP abuses that trust.

Joe Lieberman *is* the Neville Chamberlain of bipartisan politics, and this fact needs to be made explicitly clear - don't let him negotiate for or represent the Democratic party.

Neville Chamberlain was not a bad man. He was a man that assumed a certain degree of honesty in his allies, rivals, and adversaries - a degree of honesty that is a reasonable assumption, most of the time. They may lie to you while negotiating, deceive, cheat, beg and steal, but if you get fooled it's your own fault and at the end of the day they will hold to what was agreed to.

It assumes a certain investment in the status quo - you're going to have to negotiate again, so you need to maintain that ability to be negotiated with, down the line. Chamberlains fundamental failure was that he never recognized that, so far as the Nazi's were concerned, they were never going to be so weak as to need to negotiate with Britain ever again. Thus, whatever the result of the negotiation, it needed to be held to only so far as that was convenient for Germany.

The GOP has no intent to be held to any standards of behavior that result of any meeting of the minds betwixt them and any Democratic 'ambassador', any longer than is convenient to the end of being the sole political party with meaningful power in the United States, ever again. That has been their stated goal, and the leadership that espoused that goal has not changed.

They fete upon Joe Lieberman for no reason other than that Joe Lieberman is of use to them in achieving this goal, despite their setbacks of the last congress. They don't regret their actions, they have no respect for an alternate point of view, they have no particular respect for Joe Lieberman.

Which, unfortunately, he does not seem to realize.

Joe - you are not going to secure "Peace in our Time", or even bipartisanship.

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