I wrote a blog entry back in early November that applauded Joe Lieberman’s work back in the 1960s. His self-description: : “…I led a group of Yale students to Mississippi in the fall of 1963 to participate in a Freedom Vote campaign to try to get the right to vote for people in Mississippi regardless of their color…”
I juxtaposed this with his election staff thugs assaulting members of Ned Lamont’s campaign and in an irony of ironies surrounding a Lamont campaign bus and refusing to let any one get off.
I wrote: “Sadly, this is a snapshot of Joe Lieberman’s devolvement. In his youth, he worked to get black voters registered–a thoroughly laudable and commendable effort. In 2006, in his electoral desperation, he borrows from Karl Rove’s tactics.”
I also wrote: “What picture this cumulatively paints is that the 2006 Joe Lieberman is only for Joe Lieberman, always and forever. The youthful principles demonstrated in his youth have dissipated after coming face-to-face with adult self interest. He has moved from altruistically busing down South to help register the dispossessed to having his ‘supporters’ surrounding a bus and refusing to let anyone disembark. Lieberman has no qualms about who supports him and why or the nefarious actions his backers undertake as long as it gets him re-elected. To him, all is justifiable in the name of Joe. Principled to principle-less. Nice guy to craven selfishness.That’s the Joe Lieberman downward arc.”
Now comes this:
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Jan 12, 2007
Jan. 11, 2007 – Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans…
…Asserting that there were “too many important questions that cannot be answered,” Lieberman and other committee Democrats complained in a statement last year that the panel “did not receive information or documents showing what actually was going on in the White House…”
…Among the missing material: the record of a videoconference in the White House Situation Room in which former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown said he warned senior officials about the dire situation in New Orleans, but was greeted with “deafening silence.” Also missing: records believed to include messages and conversations involving the president, Vice President Dick Cheney and their top aides during the days in late August and early September 2005 when the Katrina disaster was unfolding and thousands of city residents were flocking to overcrowded shelters and hanging onto rooftops awaiting rescue…”
Apparently in Joe’s mind, his efforts at so-called bipartisanship (what most others call ‘please kick me again and again’) override the cries of the dispossessed and desperate in New Orleans. He once went to great lengths to help those in dire need of assistance and has now done so yet again. Displaying his current values and morality–he’s chosen woebegone George Bush over the forlorn and abandoned diaspora of New Orleans residents.
Maybe this is how would Joe describe his later life 2007 efforts: “I joined a group of Republicans who have spent the better part of six years harming this country to participate in a coverup campaign to try and prevent justice for the people of New Orleans.”
I have a new name for Lieberman — Joe ‘n’ Lie.
