The Joe and John Show

Check out Ezra Klein's latest post on John McCain's partnership with Joe Lieberman. One thing that strikes me is this. In MSM terms, one shows honesty and freethinking exclusively by showing disloyalty to one's political party. Thus, McCain and Lieberman are Bold Truth Tellers.

In the real world, guys like McCain and Lieberman seem to be to be unusually unprincipled -- totally unmoored from a whole range of political commitments. But what really drives them both is their shared and slightly daft worldviews on foreign policy. McCain is pro-life, Lieberman pro-choice, but they both seem to be personally indifferent to these questions and to most other questions. But war? Oh they love war. It's odd, under the circumstances, for the GOP's last best hope to be someone whose emotional core is so close to the very invasion of Iraq whose disastrous consequences have touched off so much coalitional unraveling.

Comments

Jacob Weisberg's sneering piece of scolding my state for voting for Ned Lamont remains one of the most putrid pieces of commentary ever. Why, the horrors, a liberal state voting for a candidate who actually represents their interests. What a contrarian! How provocative! How out of line with "liberal orthodoxy!"

Posted by Freddie | January 4, 2008 2:48 PM

And Iraq will be their Achilles' heel. Lowry and them are declaring victory for "the surge" in a most absurdly myopic manner. How likely is it that the current Mexican standoff is going to stay quiet for 11 months? I wouldn't be buying into that IPO--no way....

Posted by elle loco | January 4, 2008 3:37 PM

MY - In MSM terms, one shows honesty and freethinking exclusively by showing disloyalty to one's political party. Thus, McCain and Lieberman are Bold Truth Tellers.
In the real world,
guys like McCain and Lieberman seem to be to be unusually unprincipled -- totally unmoored from a whole range of political commitments

Good metanarrative perspective on the media's cardinal trait of loving disloyalty - and lauding the disloyal and the opoortunists as heroic truth-tellers. It makes sense because the media lives in hard news on the disgruntled who are their sources of leaks, dirt on those they oppose or the gadfly, the maverick that gets so much ink.

McCain and Lieberman are not the best examples, however, because they operate with some honor while being betrayers.

1. Lieberman wants war as long as war is good for Israel. As an orthodox Jew, Lieberman embraced progressive values on criminal rights, affirmative action, more taxes, no death penalty - but his conservative core religious values made him speak out against Clinton sleaze, sale of the WhiteHouse to his special friends and donors. And to attack his fellow Jews in Hollywood for all the purience and corrupting values they unleashed on America and through open markets, on the world. Which other Dems hated because the rich Jewish media moguls were among their biggest individual donors.

2. McCain's whole life has been predicated on a belief that he has more honor than anyone else because he served and suffered more than any of the opponents he has. In practice, McCain narrows his honor to only a few areas - no more corruption after he was caught and used his POW status to wiggle off (the Keating 5 scandal), suport the military at least as HE would run it if he was in charge. Just about everything else is up for sabotage if he goes into a backroom with Teddy Kennedy and his other "good friends" - then the criteria for betrayal is if he thinks the media will love it.
Of course, as a man with a huge temper and some erratic behavior, he HATES being called untrustworthy, disloyal, a betrayer, the Manchurian Candidate. To him, everything he does is honorable because no one else suffered as a POW, thus everything he elects to do is automatically the deeds of an honorable man who DESERVES the Presidency.

Posted by Chris Ford | January 4, 2008 3:49 PM

Just ran across this little piece of history, will someone give Dan Coats a prize or something?

PBS News Hour, August 7, 2000

FORMER SEN. DAN COATS: First of all, Joe Lieberman's a terrific fellow, and I'm a good friend. It's hard to say anything negative about him, but I do think it raises the question about Al Gore, why he chose Joe Lieberman, because their positions on some of the key issues in this campaign, Social Security reform, education, national defense -- Joe Lieberman's much closer to George Bush than he is to Al Gore and how he's going to finesse that or answer that I'm not exactly sure. And how Al Gore's going to explain that, whether it's another attempt to reinvent Al Gore or another attempt to cover both sides of the issue, I think is going to be a question, because there are very fundamental issues where Al Gore has attacked Governor Bush for taking that position, and yet it's exactly the same position or very close to what Joe Lieberman has done and said on the Senate floor.

Posted by artapppraiser | January 4, 2008 4:10 PM

Heckuva job, Gorey!

Posted by croatoan | January 4, 2008 4:50 PM

You can add a third bizarre virtue to the establishment trio of "honest" and "free thinking" -- "courageous." A politician shows courage, by establishment standards, in doing something that people will hate. But for their own good of course.

One never shows courage in taking on powerful interests, or bucking a spiteful administration, or in standing up for little folks. Only in shoving things down their throats.

The good Mr. Joe Klein articulates this almost pre-parodied:

But there isn't that much short-term risk in calling for higher taxes (on the wealthy, inevitably) in a Democratic primary. Far riskier — and worthy of a Teddy Award — is telling party loyalists things they don't want to hear.

http://tinyurl.com/2vvj4c

Posted by Dave Meyer | January 4, 2008 5:11 PM

I find this post diagnostically absurd. The idea of partisanship as some kind of "principle" is exactly what's wrong with our political system today. Most voters do not identify themselves as Republicans OR Democrats, much less from the wingnut edge of either party so frequently represented in blogs like this one. People who can't tell the difference between political opponents and real enemies would benefit from more exposure to some of the latter, of whom we have quite enough without trying to turn legitimate patriots like McCain or Lieberman into them.

And I would just point out to Freddie that most voters in Connecticut, including a lot of Democrats like me, voted for Joe exactly because he "represents their interests", including our interest in not surrendering to an aggressive, genocidal police state.

Posted by Robert Powell | January 4, 2008 5:18 PM

Powell--right: Parties shouldn't stand for ANYthing! Nor should their members. Preening narcissism shall rule the day! Ah, sweet democracy....

Posted by elle loco | January 4, 2008 7:17 PM

Mr. Powell,

What is this state to which you said we were planning on surrendering? I don't recall China ever invading us. At least, where I live, I don't see any PLA around. Do you?

I hope you're not talking about Iraq, because, to quote A Bridge Too Far, even if we were to surrender, which I don't remember anyone suggestion, the Iraqis would have to admit they "haven't the proper facilities to take you all prisoner! Sorry!"

Posted by Greg | January 4, 2008 8:48 PM

Robert Powell,

I agree with you here:

Most voters do not identify themselves as Republicans OR Democrats, much less from the wingnut edge of either party so frequently represented in blogs like this one. People who can't tell the difference between political opponents and real enemies would benefit from more exposure to some of the latter

though I don't get your "genocidal police state" reference at all.

In any case, if people like you could stand the abusive reactions until there was more of a balance of opinion, I think it would help a lot if your opinion was represented more on blogs like this one. It's not the case that I personally happen to sympathize with McCain or Lieberman ideological stances, I don't, but I think that the liberal blogosphere is often so woefully echo-chambered about who does think along those lines, almost to the point of being in a bubble like Bush. They then proceed from that point of unreality and expect their own preferred presidential candidates to do something impossible, to change political reality.

Posted by artappraiser | January 4, 2008 9:56 PM

No figure in American politics is as loathsome a traitor as Joe Lieberman. Even Benedict Arnold had some good points - he was Washington's best General. Joe McCarthy ruined a lot of good people's lives with his bullshit, but the guy himself wasn't a total a-hole. Forget for a moment his zeal to sacrifice American blood, treasure, its international standing, its decaying infrastructure, civil liberties...for Israel and just contemplate his warmed-over schmaltz persona, his constipated whine of a voive, his staggering venality, the personal affront he is to anyone and everyone he comes into contact with...and what you have is the most unutterably squalid fecal matter dressed up like a human to ever pass before us.

Posted by Trevor | January 4, 2008 10:22 PM

Trevor has never met Chris Ford.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 4, 2008 11:04 PM

No-one has ever met Chris Ford. He doesn't exist. Someone automated a sewage treatment plant, its computer network achieved a crude sort of sentience and started posting comments to Matt's blog ... and the rest is history.

Posted by Warren Terra | January 5, 2008 12:40 AM

Warren, that beats my comment by a country mile. Well done.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 5, 2008 6:42 AM

On the "parties shouldn't stand for ANYTHING" joke, of course they should. They just shouldn't stand for disagreement as a primary value in its own right, and dress up the disagreements that are inevitable as automatically between angels (us) and devils (them). I like Obama's take on the subject best: "Some say the Democrats don't stand for anything. This is unfair. We DO stand for anything!"

Lieberman and McCain, like about three out of four other Senators, representing an even greater consensus in the public at large, recognized that twelve years after Iraq had dragged us into a war in the Persian Gulf, comprehensively violated the ceasefire agreement and related Chapter VII Resolutions, implicated us in genocide via the sanctions regime (which was in tatters), and remained in a position to carry on with even worse going forward, presented us with a pretty clear choice in 2003 of invade or surrender. Those still sipping the Deaniac koolaid should familiarize themselves with the basic source documents (the Duelfer, Hutton, and similar reports, the Resolutions, Hans Blix's final report, Lord Goldsmith's finding for Parliament, the statements of Congressional Democrats during the 2004 elections, etc.) before launching into the usual regurgitated pablum about "Bush lies took us into the worst illegal war in human history".

We need more bi-partisanship in general, but especially in the area of foreign policy. I don't see any reason we can't develop the kind of consensus that in the past allowed us to defeat fascism and outlast communism. The only thing standing in the way are the narcissists who see politics as some kind of lifestyle choice or fashion statement.

Posted by Robert Powell | January 5, 2008 8:14 AM

Matt - I do not think Joe "Short Ride" Lieberman can be described accurately as pro-choice anymore.

Like everything else with Joe, that position apparently is expendable:

"Lieberman said he believes hospitals that refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims for 'principled reasons' shouldn't be forced to do so. 'In Connecticut, it shouldn't take more than a short ride to get to another hospital'"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/lieberman-betrays-rape-vi_b_17312.html

Posted by lobstakilla | January 5, 2008 9:35 AM

Robert, that's all well and good, and like artappraiser, I agree with a lot of it.

But you still need to explain your belief we were close to surrendering to a "genocidal police state"...

Posted by Greg | January 5, 2008 11:49 AM

Greg--
First, there should be no debate on defining Ba'athist Iraq as a genocidal police state.

In early 2003 we had close to half a million Coalition troops perched on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula because, by general agreement, this was the only way to get UN inspectors back into the country. At this point Hans Blix reported that Iraq was still not cooperating with the inspections as required by multiple Chapter VII Resolutions, Chirac had declared that France would veto any enforcement of the Resolutions, and we had in practical terms only two choices--invade and enforce the Resolutions, or surrender.

No one with any military expertise will dispute the vulnerability of a force poised on the brink of an offensive, especially with the generally agreed upon likelihood of the presence of wmd's in theater; and the agreement signed between Saddam and Total/Fina/Elf for the development of fully one third of Iraq's oil reserves in 2002 made explicitly clear the future of "containment".

Minus the invasion we would now have an extremely well-financed fascist totalitarianism in Iraq engaged in a nuclear arms race with Iran and Saudi Arabia, with any semblance of UN authority dashed and no realistic hope of the "regime change" which had been official US policy since 1998.

People like McCain and Lieberman don't "love war", but they do recognize reality when they see it. So does, in my opinion, most of the American electorate. Candidates and their supporters who imagine that we can just switch the channel to Animal Planet and all the ugliness in the Greater Persian Gulf will go away are deluded, and headed for another date with reality similar to the 2004 election.

Posted by Robert Powell | January 5, 2008 12:39 PM