Matt Taibbi: 'Dead man coming: Lieberman is not going away'

Don't hold your breath waiting for Joe Lieberman to go away.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Late at night in Hartford's Goodwin Hotel last Tuesday -- I'm not even sure
what time it was -- Joe Lieberman made his way to the podium for his
much-anticipated "concession" speech.

I'd been joking with another reporter that en route to his capitulation Joe
would leave fingernail tracks in the carpet leading all the way back to his
private room upstairs, but surprisingly he did not have to be dragged
onstage at all, and his little elfin nails looked unbloodied and intact as
he spoke. I was looking over a crowd of reporters and Joe staffers, off to
the right and to the rear of the hall, as he announced his determination to
press on:

"If the people of Connecticut are good enough to send me back to Washington
. . . " he began, "I promise them I will keep fighting for the same
progressive new ideas and for stronger national security . . . "

At the words progressive new ideas I couldn't help myself and let out a
little laugh, recalling Lieberman's determination to yank funding from
public schools that counseled suicidal teens that it was OK to be gay. Was
that the kind of progressive idea he was talking about? I really did try to
muffle it, but it was too late -- a middle-aged woman with big dangly
earrings in a Lieberman T-shirt whipped around and glared at me.

"Yes?" I said.

"Have some respect!" she snapped.

"What?" I shouted.

"You should be ashamed of yourself!" she hissed.

I shrugged. A few minutes later, Lieberman ended his speech with an
impassioned promise to fight on: "I believe tonight, more than ever, in
America's greatness in its values . . . Will you join me? "

Roars, cheers from the crowd; the sneering lady in front of me jumped up and
down; and then, weirdly, Joe descended from the stage to the strains of the
Tattoo You-era Rolling Stones anthem "Start Me Up." As the defeated Democrat
(now officially an insurgent candidate) hugged his family and shook hands
with his supporters, the familiar but suddenly unpleasant lyrics shot out
through the ballroom:

If you start me up

If you start me up I'll never stop . . .

Slide it up!

As I listened to this, another Joe supporter -- a somewhat older woman in
horn-rimmed glasses -- came over and cornered me.

"You know what?" she said. "You reporters are all alike. You won't admit it,
but you're all anti-Semites . . . "

I scratched my head. Anti-Semites? The song rattled on creepily:

If you rough it up

If you like it you can slide it up, slide it up

I shuddered at this, trying to keep my wits, but Horn-Rimmed Glasses was
still whaling away at me. "You people really do have no respect," she went
on. "Joe is such a wonderful man . . . "

"Listen," I exploded, interrupting her. "Do you know what this song is
about?"

She froze.

"It's about a guy who gets an erection that doesn't go away," I said. "Can
you explain to me why this song is playing now? What the hell is wrong with
you people?"

Horn-Rimmed frowned and listened. At that exact moment Mick Jagger was
wrapping the song up:

You, you make a dead man come . . .

You, you make a dead man come . . .

The woman recoiled, briefly assumed a quizzical expression, then walked away
shaking her head, like the song was my fault.

My experience at the Lieberman event was not unique. A number of other
reporters were accosted by a man who showed up at the Goodwin dressed in a
Hillary Clinton T-shirt and proceeded to cruise the periphery of the
ballroom accusing the indifferently boozing crowd of journalists of being
pro-Hezbollah, anti-Semitic terrorist supporters. In a few cases fistfights
were narrowly avoided. Apparently the post-electoral talking points had been
issued in advance, because almost from the moment that Lieberman "conceded,"
a wave of politicians and commentators began similarly hammering home the
theme that Lamont's victory was a comfort to terrorists and Al Qaeda, his
supporters de facto collaborators.

Lieberman himself was the most shameless: speaking on the day the British
terror-plot story broke, which came just 36 hours after his loss, he said
that if Lamont's Iraq plan is implemented, "it will be taken as a tremendous
victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes." Dick Cheney
held a press teleconference to comment upon the Lamont election -- an
incredible step for a vice president to take on the occasion of an
opposition-party primary result -- and suggested that "Al Qaeda types" were
encouraged by the Lamont election. And Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the
Republican National Committee, quickly reacted to the Lamont win by calling
the Democrats the "party of defeat and retreat."

It should be noted that both Cheney and Mehlman pointedly referred to the
Lamont win as a "purge," echoing the seminal anti-Lamont editorial by the
Democratic Leadership Council from two months ago which used the term eight
times. They were joined in that effort last week by virtually the entire
conservative punditry establishment, with everyone from Cal Thomas ("Purge
by Taliban Democrats" was his clever innovation) to American Conservative
Union chief Patrick Keene ("The purge that began with the McGovernite
seizure of the party . . . ") to Foundation for Defense of Democracies
president Clifford May ("The August Purge of Lieberman," a funny historical
malapropism; May was trying to echo Soviet Russia, which had an August
putsch, not a purge) to Fox's John McIntyre to a whole host of others
decrying Lamont's supporters as rich, elitist, neo-commie liberals bent on
softening us all up for a terrorist attack, apparently just for the pure,
America-hating thrill of it.

There is something perversely exhilarating about watching the American
political establishment in action, especially now, when -- with the Middle
East in flames, the front pages filled with news of jarring electoral
surprises, and the poll numbers of its once-brightest stars falling through
the floor -- it has begun behaving like a cornered animal, lashing out
incoherently at anything that comes near.

Lieberman himself has been stumbling around like a deer that has just been
hit and thrown 200 yards by an F-150, taking the utterly insane position
that his candidacy -- his, Joe Lieberman's candidacy -- somehow represents a
fight against the "same old" Washington politics. You have Dick Cheney and a
whole host of conservative talking heads, all pretense of two-party politics
gone now, openly parroting the talking points of the supposed other side,
the Democratic Leadership Council. And then you have Times columnist David
Brooks, acting like a man high on laughing gas, committing to print that
positively amazing assertion that "polarized primary voters should not be
allowed to define the choices in American politics."

(That one might be my all-time favorite; flailing around in search of a new
group on the margins to demonize, this yutz accidentally argues that voters
shouldn't be allowed to decide elections. I thought it was funny, but Brooks
this time nearly gave Dave Sirota an aneurysm.)

The reason the Lamont election has all of Washington so badly freaked out
and dug in is that it's revealed a crack in the long-dependable mechanism of
mainstream American politics. For almost four decades now conservatives in
both parties have been governing according to a very simple formula. You run
against Jane Fonda and George McGovern in election season, then you spend
the next four years playing golf, shooting flightless birds, and taking
$25,000 speaking gigs in Aspen while you let your fundraisers run things
around the office.

But their problem now is that they've fucked up Iraq and everything else so
badly that they've practically made "McGovernism" mainstream. A whole
generation of hacks has reached office running against George McGovern, and
now Joe Lieberman is threatening to ruin things for everybody, just like
Jimmy Carter wrecked the Barry Goldwater gravy train for the last generation
by falling on his face against Ronald Reagan. If there is such a thing as a
principle in Washington, avoiding such a catastrophe as that is it. That's
why they won't let Joe die easy -- no matter how much he seems to deserve
it.

Source: Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11151851/
the_low_post_lieberman_is_not_going_away/print

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson