Axis of Heroes: Stephen Henry

Generally I blog to vent, usually over things that irritate or frustrate me.
If you manage to wend your way through some of the previous posts, you know that I have made a special acknowledgment to the enablers of this administration.

It is no secret that I despise Bush and his cronies for they represent virtually everything that is wrong with this country. They are intellectually dishonest or unaware, greedy, hypocritical and self serving. For me this is our generation's McCarthy period where the very foundations of our country are being tested by dishonest and disingenuous human beings who are guiding this country towards fascism all the while proclaiming their patriotism (for more on this read Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps" in the April 24, 2007 issue of the Guardian). History tells us that those who hide behind the flag and the specter of patriotism are the ones who usually compromise and contradict the values that our wonderful democracy and Bill of Rights actually represent. History will not treat Bush or his enablers kindly.

But this is not another political rant. This is a particularly sad one. I have some friends who care to engage in political or other intellectual discourse. We may not always agree but we challenge each other and provoke some serious thought and reflection.

This is an elegy to one of those voices which was silenced on September 29, 2007. My good friend Stephen Henry lost his valiant fight with the horrible disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's disease."

Actually Steve was silenced months before when he lost his ability to speak so the extended conversations essentially stopped there. He was left to type out his communication via computer (I should say "tap out" since he was as pathetic a typist as yours truly) or scribble out his thoughts on a piece of paper. Gradually those motor skills deserted him as well, leaving all communication as a simple shake or nod of the head or the ubiquitous "thumbs up" .

Steve was an extraordinary human being, a man with a quiet dignity and I'm glad to say my good friend. He was a gentle soul, not one for material goods. He was not prey to the pettiness or the narcissism that sometimes plagues the human condition. I never once heard him speak ill of another person. Perhaps in a rare moment he would flash a look of skepticism or disbelief but he was never rude or unkind.

Steve was habitually upbeat and positive, preferring to find the humor in any situation. His sunny disposition and outlook made him a joy to be around while serving to remind me of my own shortcomings. He was generous of spirit and loved giving gifts to his friends, especially the female ones. Steve was simply an amazing person and I'm not saying that just because he was my friend. As the Irish like to say, he had a lot of gifts, save the gift of years.

He was indeed a modest man who chose to work as a teacher of special needs kids in the Los Angeles United School District. I'm not sure this was even work for Steve but something he really loved. Clearly he loved his kids, his colleagues and his work. He had a special gift for his work whether it was sharing his life with his special needs students or simply sharing with them his pet boa constrictor "Fluffy". And clearly they loved him as we found out at his memorial service.

One can take the measure of a man by the company he keeps. From his many friends whom I've met over the past ten years, to the many people who stepped up for Steve when his illness became apparent or who came to the parties and other social functions, I've learned that he was indeed an extraordinary rich and fortunate man with many friends.

And now looking back after his recent death, I came to realize Steve was giving us all one last gift beyond bearing witness to his remarkable courage: that of his love of his friends and his family. As he courageously stared down his illness, he introduced his friends to one another, allowing relationships to thrive and flourish. He gave that so we might give of ourselves which is one hell of a final farewell.

Steve and I met shortly after I moved to Los Angeles from New York. We had mutual friends and then discovered that we shared the same health club so we saw each other often. Since we were both chronically without girlfriends, we spent a lot of time together trying to remedy this situation.

For Steve, dating was a science that needed to be deconstructed and evaluated. He took it very seriously, trying a variety of tacts, once even joining the Playboy Club so he could hang out at the mansion and play pool--all the while eying the very attractive bunnies. He read a lot of books, purchased self help tapes and cds, tried online dating services and so forth. He would schedule his appearance at the health club based on the periodic influx of young talent. More than once he dragged me to singles parties that he somehow encountered either online or through other single friends.

The dating scene was very important to him because it opened up the possibility of a long term relationship and marriage--two values that I think were very important to Steve. Like the rest of us, he had his share of successes and failures. But whatever happened, he remained positive and hopeful that the right one was just around the corner. And so he went about it in an extremely methodical way and I know it was one of his biggest, if not the biggest, regrets that he never married.

Another way he chose to present himself to the fairer sex was on the dance floor. By all reports, he was quite the salsa dancer and though I never witnessed his talent, one friend respectfully (and not without more than a little envy, I should add) referred to him as a shark, moving gracefully along the dance floor looking for female dancers as prey to be his dance partners.

He began experiencing problems with his leg in August of 2005. His foot dragged and he described it as if he was wearing a snorkeling flipper on one foot. For months he went through a variety of tests while battling his insurance provider to authorize some genetic testing. Steve was adopted so he had no clue as to his birth family's medical history. The initial diagnoses were either misleading (at one point ALS was actually eliminated) or uncertain.

As his mobility worsened, he continued to persevere. Finally in March of 2006 he was informed that he had ALS. I remember the day he told me. I had been traveling on business and just returned to LA after several weeks. We ran into each other at the gym and he matter-of-factly informed me that he was diagnosed. No anguish. No moment for self pity. I was stunned and shaken, primarily because I had heard that ALS had been eliminated earlier and now it turned out to be the culprit but also because he was SO calm and in control of his emotions while the rest of us were numbed and upset.

He announced his illness to his friends in this dramatic, humorous and uplifting email on March 19th 2006.

As some of you already know, two weeks ago at UCLA I was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). It is a progressive degenerative neurological disorder. There is no cure or treatment, and the cause of the disease is still unknown. The neurologist said I have probably about 3 and a half years left to live.

I was anticipating that when the neurologists finally figured out what I have, it wasn’t going to be good news. Walking now is a challenge for me, and speech is becoming increasingly difficult...

Since traditional medicine doesn’t hold any answers, I am continuing to explore alternative treatments to halt or slow the progression of the disease. However, if this is the way I am meant to die, then so be it. I am not afraid of death, but I would prefer to die in a more dignified manner - like being trampled by the elephants at the circus.

This disease may break my body, but it won’t break my spirit. I intend to keep on living each day to the fullest and laughing about it all. The love and support I have received over the past year from you has kept me going, and I do appreciate all of the wonderful people in my life.

-Steve

Per the ALS web site, this is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually lead to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.

A-myo-trophic comes from the Greek language. "A" means no or negative. "Myo" refers to muscle, and "Trophic" means nourishment---"No muscle nourishment." When a muscle has no nourishment, it "atrophies" or wastes away. "Lateral" identifies the areas in a person's spinal cord where portions of the nerve cells that signal and control the muscles are located. As this area degenerates it leads to scarring or hardening ("sclerosis") in the region.

As motor neurons degenerate, they can no longer send impulses to the muscle fibers that normally result in muscle movement. Early symptoms of ALS often include increasing muscle weakness, especially involving the arms and legs (as in Steve's case) , speech, swallowing or breathing. When muscles no longer receive the messages from the motor neurons that they require to function, the muscles grow weak and begin to atrophy.

Steve confronted his illness with a very strong spirit and a determination to live the best possible life available to him. He faced each challenge in a courageous, thoughtful and private way. I never heard him once complain. I never heard him utter one word of self pity. I never heard him ask anything of anyone that made them uncomfortable about his illness. So I made every attempt to avoid or ignore the illness or even the mention of it. Obviously this is not always possible but I made every effort that when I visited, that his illness would not be front and center.

In addition to his profound courage, Steve also approached his illness with a sense of humor. He reveled in making jokes about his condition all the while trying to lighten the load for his friends. He spoke fondly of the attention paid to him ("chicks dig wheelchairs"). He loved zipping down the street and often spoke of his desire to trick out his wheelchair. He embraced the little things like disabled parking and sidewalk cutouts that eased the quality of his life, mostly because we learned that not every city or town actually has them.

But most importantly, everything he did was for the benefit of his friends, to ease our pain. And I'd like to think we responded in kind. Unfortunately I have seen a fair amount illness and death in my life with both my parents and my sister having suffered from terminal illnesses. I've found that friends either step up or they step away. I'm happy to report that most--not all--of Steve's friends stepped up and in a very big way.

After Steve was diagnosed, a bunch of us got together and formed a support group. Our goals were a lot loftier than what we accomplished but I do know that we made things a bit easier for him. We searched for wheelchair friendly apartments and when one was found, we moved him in. We took turn running errands, buying food or taking him to the doctors. In 2006 we threw him a surprise birthday/Cinco de Mayo party and he loved it. In February of this year we arranged a party at Casa Del Mar, where Steve liked to sit and watch the less than subtle pick ups. But mostly we visited him, talked with him and shared our lives with him. I know many of us made a concerted effort to visit with him as often as possible, trying to keep his spirits up. And we did.

Like others, I was with him at several watershed moments in his illness: at the beginning when he struggled with health care providers to pay for genetic testing; when he decided to move permanently into a wheelchair and when he got an unwelcome reality check from a woman whose husband died of ALS (both on our Mexican adventure in June of 2006); last August when he was betrayed by a Peruvian woman who tried to take advantage; last winter when he began to lose the ability to speak and again this summer when he could no longer hold a pencil in order to write. I came back from my annual sojourn to Vermont and knew Steve was not long for this earth. So I made a concerted effort to spend as much time with him as possible. These were remarkable visits as we sat and watched the Los Angeles Dodgers. I did a lot of talking and Steve, very patiently, did a lot of listening. I made a point of hugging him and made no effort to disguise my genuine love and affection for him.

I've witnessed some extraordinary bravery in my life, firstly from my own sister who defied every expectation and through the avatar of her own will lived six years after being told she would survive for only two and now from Steve, who was dauntless and heroic in his own battle with this insidious disease.

So I want to honor my friend and his courage. I don't mean to suggest that Steve was the apotheosis of perfection but he was indeed quite remarkable. Yes he was capable of occasional miscalculations and errors of judgment in public and private affairs. Like all of us, he was prey for the usual human failures. But on the essentials, for the long run, in good times and bad, Steve Henry lived a honorable and productive--albeit all too brief--life. I am proud to have known him and to call him my friend. He was loved and he will be very sorely missed.

In Steve's honor I am starting the Axis of Heroes and he is indeed the very first--and very likely only--honoree.

Stephen Henry died in his sleep on Saturday September 29, 2007. He had made the very difficult decision very early on in his illness that he did not want to be on a respirator. So he gradually weakened as he struggled for breath. He died with dignity, bravely facing his fate in a way that defies easy description and is quite frankly beyond my ability to articulate. He was only 49 years old.

So I'll close by sharing his final email, something he thoughtfully composed well in advance of his death but delivered shortly afterwards, followed by a few stanzas from one of my favorite poems ("Charles Sumner") from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

To My Beloved Family and Friends,

In March of 2006, I announced to you all that I had been diagnosed with ALS and that the doctors had given me about three more years before my body would finally give up on me.

Well, they got the disease right, but the time frame was slightly off.

If only we did have more time.

Today, much to my relief, my spirit has moved forward into God's Light. The only regret I carry with me is that now is the time we must say goodbye.

Thank you for your love, your support, your prayers, your thoughts, your friendship, your goodwill and your amazing humor. Every moment I had with you in good times (and even in not-so-good times) was a tremendous gift to me. I thank you again.

Our goodbye is only for now. The next time you see me, I'll be the guy standing up -- no wheelchair -- with the outstretched arms and a big smile; ready to give you a huge hug.

Until that time, we can all count our blessings every moment of every day.

I certainly count you as one of mine.

In Love and God's Light,

Steve


...Death takes us by surprise,
And stays our hurrying feet;
The great design unfinished lies,
Our lives are incomplete.

But in the dark unknown
Perfect their circles seem,
Even as a bridge's arch of stone
Is rounded in the stream.

Alike are life and death,
When life in death survives,
And the uninterrupted breath
Inspires a thousand lives.

Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.

So when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Axis of Assholes: Joe Lieberman (Part II)

Bipartisanship and loyalty:
Senator Joe Lieberman likes to position himself as being bipartisan while lecturing others on their lack of same. Oddly enough his words seem directed more at Democrats and rarely if ever at Republicans. So when the Bush White House and its minions broke the law by outing covert CIA operative Valerie Plame as an act of political retribution because her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson challenged their phony uranium cake charges in Niger, Lieberman was silent. When the tough-talking drug abuser Viagra Boy Rush (I got out of the VietNam war draft because I had a pimple on my ass) Limbaugh slurs Iraqi war veterans who oppose the war as "phony soldiers", Lieberman was silent. When a Mitch McConnell senate staffer starts a campaign to swift boat 12-year old Graeme Frost over his words supporting the S-Chip bill by sending an email full of lies and misrepresentations causing the family to get death threats from the lunatic right wing fringe, Lieberman was again silent.

But god forbid Moveon.org run an ad fairly questioning the motives of General David Petraeus (see an earlier blog on this subject) Lieberman is quick to condemn. MoveOn.org's full-page advertisement was slammed by Lieberman, who called the allegation 'an outrageous and despicable act of slander that every member of the Congress -- Democrat and Republican -- has a solemn responsibility to condemn.'"

Perhaps even more outrageous was his response to the Mark Foley affair. Foley was the congressman who was exposed as a child sexual predator, having Internet sex with underage pages between House votes. A fellow Republican congressman exposed evidence that the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was informed of the sexual predator's behavior, and did nothing about it for months or even years. Hastert did not deny the evidence. Yet, when lawmakers called for the Speaker to resign, what did Joe Lieberman do? He focussed his major attacks not on the sexual predator, not on the Speaker who covered up the scandal - but instead, he attacked critics of the Speaker.

One Connecticut blogger followed Lieberman's campaign, noting that the scandal, in which he reiterated his earlier attacks on Ned Lamont and others for calling for Hastert's immediate resignation in the wake of the sexual predator scandal: "Right now I'd say this thing is spinning out of control, it's become another partisan frenzy in Washington, that's the wrong way to go at it."

"...So Joe Lieberman's major reaction to this awful, disgusting and horrific scandal is to berate as "partisan" those who want just a smidgeon of accountability? Of course, he never explains how it can be "partisan" when many of the loudest calls for Hastert's immediate resignation are from conservatives. But even beyond the dishonesty is the sheer shamelessness of it all. These pious declarations are coming from the same man who used the consensual affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to build his own name recognition by parading himself all over the Washington talk show circuit as Mr. Moral."

So Lieberman's empty words on bipartisanship are just another example of a politician preening; in effect its another case of do as I say not as I do. Like the not-so-straight talking express McCain, the media portrays Lieberman as a maverick, a moderate Democrat looking for common ground. But Lieberman is hardly a moderate. He’s objectively for himself while pretending to represent the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. He provides “centrist Democratic” cover for all sorts of GOP hobby horses. There are some real centrists–Joe Biden, Mark Warner, Chris Dodd, Evan Bayh–but all of them understand that at the end of the day, they’re Democrats. They understand that in a pinch, their loyalty lies more with Dick Durbin or Nancy Pelosi than George Bush or the ethically-challenged Mitch McConnell, the Senator who denied in a TV interview that his staff sent the email that started the Graeme Frost swift boating disaster. Oh yeah an aside here: sorry Senator but you are one bold-faced liar. We know that emails are traceable, we know that they came from your office and from the time line of events we know that you knew about it when you denied it on TV.

Strange bedfellows: His evangelical friends.
Joe Lieberman is a devout Orthodox Jew. From the moment he was elected to office and especially when he joined Al Gore on the 2000 national ticket, there were some fears that Lieberman's faith would affect perceptions on both sides of the Middle East peace process. Some have even intimated that Lieberman's primary loyalty is to Israel, not the US. Personally I have no such problem and I could care less, as long as he can separate his political points of view from his religious ones. The problem is, he can't.

Lieberman has made some strange friends and bedfellows in his political career. One of the strangest and most frightening is the evangelical minister and crackpot John Hagee and the group he leads, Christians United for Israel. The name of the group tells you all you need to know about why Hagee and politically opportunistic Joe Lieberman are friends and the extremes that Lieberman will embrace to defend his so-called "moderate" political point of view.

Hagee, is a little odd to say the least. For a non-religious but spiritual person like myself, Hagee represents everything I despise in organized religion. He's a bit crazed: Hagee believes that "Rapture" -- whereby all Christians literally disappear from earth upon the return of Christ, leaving all non-believers to suffer on Earth -- is "imminent." He believes that before Christ returns, the Bible contains prophecies of a series of Middle East wars against Muslims. And he also believes that God has placed an absolute bar on the giving away of any Israeli land whatsoever, and thus categorically condemns plans such as the "road map" and the Gaza withdrawal as blasphemies against God.

And this, from Hagee himself: "For those of you in Washington, Jerusalem is not up for negotiation at any time, for any reason, in the future, no matter what your road map calls for. There are still people in this nation who believes the Bible takes precedence over Washington, DC."

Which brings us to his good friend and fellow Israel supporter Joe Lieberman who spoke to this band of crazies at the Christians United For Israel in June of 2007, where he praised Hagee with this: "Pastor Hagee, I pray that God will bless you with all that you pray for, and I do so with great confidence because I know what the Lord said to Abraham in Genesis 12:3. If ever there was a man who will be blessed because he has blessed Israel, Pastor Hagee, it is you."

"I believe that Israel's rebirth in 1948 was divinely inspired by God, but I know that it was realized by the men and women here on earth who worked so hard to make it happen. Israel will be sustained by the work of men and women like you here on Earth. And I know you know how truly American is your support of Israel. . .

"If we surrender to the barbarism of suicide bombers and yield the Middle East to fanatics and killers, to Al Qaeda and Iran, then all that our men and women in uniform have fought, and died for, will be lost, we will be left a much less secure and free nation, and our Middle East allies -- including Israel -- will be endangered.

"Fortunately, you here tonight know that evil will not prevail if good people act. And I know you will not allow Iran and Al Qaeda to triumph over America and Israel.

So who is this man that Lieberman holds in such high regard? And what else does he believe? Here's a nugget to consider: Hagee believes Katrina is punishment from God for a society that is becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah. "All hurricanes are acts of God," he said, " because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that."

Later, "So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the Day of Judgment, and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans."

Amen. Praise the lord, pass the collection plate and thank Joe Lieberman for sucking up to another evangelical asshole.

Privacy:
The self described moderate independent Joe Lieberman doesn't like privacy. He likes the CCTV program in the United Kingdom where every day life is monitored. Here in the US, Joe Lieberman wants surveillance cameras to keep an eye on you: On ABC’s This Week recently, Lieberman said he wants the federal government to "more widely" use surveillance cameras to spy on people across America. He also turns a blind eye to illegal wiretapping: Recently bringing up the threat that London’s terror attacks could come over to America, he called attempts by congress to investigate the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program “partisan gridlock” that was leaving us vulnerable to attack.

Lieberman used the foiled terror attempts in London to call for greater domestic spying in the United States. “I hope these terrorist attacks in London wake us up here in America to stop the petty partisan fighting going on about…electronic surveillance,” Lieberman said, referencing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s recent subpoenas of documents related to Bush’s wiretapping program that the White House has refused to release.

Not surprisingly, a few days later on Fox and Friends, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff echoed Lieberman’s call, arguing that Lieberman was “dead right” in calling for increased domestic surveillance. Once again Lieberman carries water for the Bushies.

Lieberman Punts on Katrina:
During his 2006 general election campaign, Lieberman criticized Bush's handling of Katrina, and had complained about the administration's failure to turn over related documents. This was part of his master plan to show separation for Bush, the man who embraced him at the 2006 State of the Union address. Now that the campaign is over, oops, never mind...

On reporter noted that Lieberman "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."

But this wasn't the only time Lieberman had abandoned a pledge to look into the Katrina disaster.

In the aftermath of Katrina, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman and Joe Lieberman, the ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a joint press conference and said hearings would be held. "Government at all levels failed," said Collins, Republican and chairwoman of the panel, who appeared with the ranking Democrat, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman...

As quoted in the NY Times (9/6/05), Lieberman said, "In some sense, not just the Gulf Coast was attacked but America's self-confidence in the aftermath of the way government responded to this crisis. And this is no time for politics."

Of course he wanted to avoid politics because he was in full cover his ass mode. Here's what Lieberman during the 2002 confirmation hearings for Michael Brown's appointment to head FEMA:

"I am glad the President has nominated someone already familiar with FEMA's mission to become Deputy Director.

"I will certainly support your nomination. I will do my best to move it through the Committee as soon as possible so we can have you fully and legally at work in your new position."

The only thing he didn't say was "Doin' a heckuva job Brownie!"

The Terry Schiavo case:
Ok, one fully expects morally reprehensible and intellectual light weights like George Bush, Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum and others to weigh in on the wrong side of the Terry Schiavo case. They're morons. And how can any of us forget the absurd asswipe Dr. Bill Frist diagnosing Terry Schiavo from videotape footage. But it is quite another for someone like Joe Lieberman to pontificate on family values and personal privacy while stomping all over them trying to score political points. And he did offer support for legislation allowing federal courts to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case.

While running for reelection in 2006 as an independent, Lieberman tried to forget all of this, saying, "It's time for politicians to let Terri Schiavo rest in peace." Too bad he didn't have the decency to say that when Michael Schiavo was battling the courts and the evangelicals to do what he thought best for his wife, Terry Schiavo. Holy Joe Lieberman jumped on their bandwagon and proceeded to bludgeon Michael Schiavo and his supporters with all sorts of rhetoric. In the midst of the Schiavo case sturm un drang, Lieberman went on "Meet The Press" moderated by the perpetually ill-informed Tim Russert to say politicians should get involved in her case.

But on the campaign trail, it was a different story. Lieberman nuanced his speech carefully because he was running for his political life and his position was hopelessly out of step with what the American public thought. So he offered a revised history and hoped no one would notice. Apparently the media didn't--no surprise there-- but the voters did.

As did Michael Schiavo. He went to Connecticut and campaigned for Lieberman opponent Ned Lamont.

Hollywood, Video games and popular culture:
Joe Lieberman opposes violent movies, video games and pornography. Big whup. I don't care much for them myself. But I'm not a politician and I don't go around lecturing others on on what is or isn't suitable for children. Lieberman is one of those politicians who likes to raise his profile by blaming all kinds of horrendous crimes on violent video games or pointing the finger at pornographers.

Oh yeah, except he’s funded in part by purveyors of porn. Despite his socially conservative views and opposition to sex in video games, Lieberman has accepted thousands in campaign contributions from corporations like Marriott that profit from the sale of pornography in their hotels.

We do not forget that Lieberman teamed with the sanctimonious serial gambler (that's not a vice is it?) William Bennett, a former Bush secretary of Education, to bash Hollywood, giving out the "Silver Sewer" award to Tinseltown's worst, slamming gangsta-rappers and others on the "wrong" side of the cultural crusade. But when he ran with Al Gore in 2000, Lieberman went to Hollywood with his hand out. So while busies himself lecturing us on morality, he or his minions are not above being hypocrites while collecting checks from the providers of morally questionable entertainment.

Thanks to Roberto Gonzalez and the San Jose Mercury News, we are reminded that Lieberman also teamed up with the crusty and despicable Lynne Cheney, wife of the mad hunter, in 1995 to set up the private American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which in 2000 gave $3.4 million to colleges and universities. While its various boards and advisory committees include elites from a diverse array of backgrounds, it is populated with a number of the usual neocon-aligned suspects, like Irving Kristol, New Republic's Martin Peretz, William Bennett, among others. According to its mission statement, ACTA “is the only national organization that is dedicated to working with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the country to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives a philosophically balanced, open-minded, high-quality education at an affordable price.”

But some have questioned the group's support for “the free exchange of ideas.” In October 2001, for example, ACTA issued a report assailing the response of U.S. universities to the 9/11 attacks, which reportedly attacked dozens of college professors and students for their supposedly less-than-patriotic reactions to the terrorist attacks. Several months later in February 2002, ACTA issued a “revised and expanded” edition, which included “a sampler of the many responses” to the original report. The revised edition, authored by ACTA staff, oddly claims that “no public official—including Lynne Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman—has endorsed or been asked to endorse this report.”

As Gonzalez wrote in the SJMN, the report became something of a blacklist. The revised report was a compendium of some 100 statements recorded by ACTA that reveal what it calls “moral equivocation” and outright hostility toward the United States among academic elites. While the original version cited the names of particular professors, leading to charges that the report resembled a blacklist, the revised edition suppressed the names “to focus discussion on the content of the views expressed, rather than the individuals who expressed them.” Also excised in the new edition were a number of scathing judgments from the original that were cited in press reports, such as the charge that “colleges and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response” to the attacks, and “when a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries.”

Lieberman punts on reproductive rights:
Joe Lieberman prides himself on being pro-choice, a strong supporter of women's rights and has the endorsement of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

But in 1991, he voted in favor of parental notification and against the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases when the life of the mother is in danger. And it didn't help when Lieberman said Catholic hospitals should not be required to offer emergency contraception to rape victims because they can easily go to another hospital.

And as blogger Jane Hamsher reminds us, Lieberman supports Anti-Choice License Plates For Connecticut. As Hamsher wrote, one of the favored ways in which the relentless and well-funded anti-choice machine is making its way into government is the "choose life" license plate scam. Part of the funds from selling the plates go to the state, but a portion also goes to support "pregnancy centers that do not offer abortion as an alternative."

"The battle seems headed for the Supreme Court, particularly since states like Tennessee — which allow sales of the plates — won’t allow pro-choice groups the same options. You expect this kind of stuff in a place like Tennessee, but when these anti-choice groups start trying to make a beach head in blue states like Connecticut using the same tactics it’s quite a different matter.

"So what happened when the Connecticut state DMV said they were reviewing the right of an out-of-state group to sell such license plates in Connecticut? The group’s president, Elizabeth Rex of Yonkers, New York, produced her letters of support, including one from…wait for it…Joe Lieberman."

The disingenuous 2006 Lieberman Campaign:
Lieberman has long had vocal critics in his home state, where the Connecticut media sees a man who seems to want everything both ways. The critics also note that Lieberman seems almost completely unaware of Connecticut local politics so Lieberman's problems in his reelection campaign ran deeper than the single issue of Iraq, though that issue was the single most important one for Democrats who nominated Ned Lamont in lieu of Joe Lieberman.

Perhaps in an effort to assuage discontent among voters, Lieberman ran for reelection as an independent, trying to stress his difference with the Bushies. Sean Smith, Lieberman's campaign manager, told blogger Ari Melber: “Our main message is that Senator Lieberman understands the anger and frustrations and the concerns about the way things are going. The Republican president and Congress have the country headed in the wrong direction, and Senator Lieberman is as angry and as frustrated as Connecticut voters are. The premise of our campaign is let's not just protest, let's not just be angry—let's channel that into positive results.” The comments prompted Melber to ask: “[What] exactly is Lieberman so angry about? He looks content discussing his hawkish views on TV. He is comfortable cutting deals with the Bush administration … In fact, it is hard to recall the last time Lieberman gave an ‘angry' speech denouncing President Bush and backed it up with action in Congress.

And as many observers have noted, the righteous fury that Lieberman publicly unleashed on President Clinton for his affair has never been deployed against any of President Bush's scandals. Not Katrina. Not Abu Ghraib. Not Plame. Not Abramoff. Not smearing veterans like John Murtha and John Kerry. And definitely not WMDs. If this is the angry Joe Lieberman, Connecticut cannot afford for him to ever calm down”

In the months leading up to the general election, Lieberman distanced himself from his earlier rhetoric on Iraq, repeatedly emphasizing his intent to end the war and bring U.S. forces home:
• In his first television ad following the August primary, Lieberman stated that he was staying in the race "because I want to help end the war in Iraq."
• An October 11 press release from his campaign described the argument that Lieberman is "continuing to back President Bush's stay the course policy" in Iraq as "an out and out lie." (This despite the fact that he has repeatedly stated the need to "stay the course" in Iraq, as Media Matters for America noted.)
• In an October 16 debate, Lieberman claimed, "No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do."
• In a November 3 press conference, Lieberman stated, "None of us wants more war; certainly not me. ... I want to bring our troops home."

The first commercial of Lieberman's re-election campaign cast him as a fighter of "big-oil Republicans." The campaign began airing a radio commercial addressed to environmentalists, an important voting bloc in a Democratic primary. Patty Pendergast, an environmentalist, talks in the commercial about Lieberman's opposition to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"The Republicans, all they want to do is drill oil and they don't see the ecosystem consequences," Pendergast said. "Joe Lieberman had no problem standing up to the big-oil Republicans. He was the leader on the arctic refuge."

But Joe Lieberman voted for George Bush's energy bill, which provided huge tax cuts to the same oil companies now reaping obscene billions in profits on the backs of consumers. And Joe Lieberman's ninth largest campaign contributor this cycle is an energy company that California's attorney general has called "Enron's twin brother" and is being sued for $2 billion for ripping off California's consumers.

Some other misrepresentations are found in a press release issued by the Lieberman campaign, ironically titled HERE ARE THE FACTS ON JOE LIEBERMAN:

• Joe Lieberman has been a scathing critic of the Bush Administration.
• Joe Lieberman is the only person in the United States of America who ran against George W. Bush twice, and beat him once.
• Lieberman criticized the Bush administration before the war started and after it began.
• Lieberman harshly criticized the Bush Administration for being unprepared for the post war situation in Iraq.
• Joe Lieberman Opposes Bush’s Attempts to Pack the Court with Right-Wing Ideologues, including Miguel Estrada and Dennis Shedd.
• Joe Lieberman OPPOSED the Nomination of Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide if these are completely accurate representations of his actual record.

One more discomforting tidbit: the man who pretends to have moral authority is also the same Joe Lieberman who distributed race baiting anti-Lamont flyers in Connecticut's black church parking lots, who started a whisper campaign that Lamont was anti-semitic, who sent his paid thugs to disrupt Lamont campaign events and intimidate Lamont supporters, who told one lie after another about his record and his positions, almost pretending to be against the Iraq war by focusing his campaign on how he was going to end it. Of course after the election, he went back on this.

Ariana Huffington and others noted that Lieberman's last campaign was waged with the support of Republicans, not Democrats, because his tactics included "attacking the Democratic Party and using Rovian slurs of the worst kind. That's why he's getting such strong Republican support..."

Mr. Bipartisan may have had little Democratic support but he sure earned a lot from Republicans. Susan Collins of Maine spoke glowingly of him. John McCain allowed two of his aides to consult with the Lieberman camp. Newt Gingrich endorsed his run. He had the support from a spin-off of the infamous Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. The newly-formed Vets For Freedom is, according to the New York Times, an "independent group" that has "ties to top Republican leaders." And the group is receiving advice from Taylor Gross, a former White House official; Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard; and the Republican strategist Dan Senor.

We can't forget Tom DeLay was a fan. The often despised former House majority leader from Texas is a Republican who may not agree with the Bush White House's favorite Democrat on every issue but who thinks the Senator is right-on when it comes to foreign policy. "[Lieberman's] very good on the war," DeLay said during an interview this week on the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" program.

And god forbid, crazy anti-semite Ann Coulter has defended Lieberman, as well, going on at some length during an interview with Fox's Neal Cavuto to explain how much she admires the senator and suggesting that, instead of fighting for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut, Lieberman ought to switch parties. "I think he should come all the way and become a Republican," argues Coulter, who says of Lieberman and the GOP: "at least he'd fit in with the party."

Even President Bush chose to support him deciding not to outwardly support Connecticut's Republican candidate. So Lieberman the "Independent" really has tremendous ties to top Republican leaders.

And Lieberman has repaid that support. Apart from Iraq, Lieberman has sided again and again with the Republican majority in the Senate: He voted for the confirmations of Alberto Gonzales, Condoleezza Rice and Michael Chertoff; he voted for the Republicans' class-action reform bill; he has flirted with Senate Republicans on Social Security reform; and while he ultimately voted against the bankruptcy reform bill, he voted for cloture on the bill, helping deny Democrats their last best chance to stop it. He has supported all of Bush's budgets for Iraq as well as voting for cloture (cutting off debate) on the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito while pretending to be against them.

Finally, Lieberman's victory allowed Republican's to try to spin the 2006 election results. Despite the shift in Lieberman's rhetoric on the war -- and the fact that exit polls in Connecticut found that 63 percent of voters support some form of withdrawal from Iraq -- prominent Republicans cast his victory as evidence that the war had not been a particularly significant factor in voters' decisions at the ballot box. For instance, during a November 8 press conference, McCain said: "If it had just been Iraq, Joe Lieberman would have never been re-elected in Connecticut, a liberal state, where he supported the president on the war." A November 12 Washington Post article quoted Rove as saying, "[I]f Iraq is the determining factor and it is a dominant opinion, then in a blue state like Connecticut you should not have 60 percent of the voters vote for one of the candidates who said, 'Stay, fight and win.' " Not surprisingly, even Anne Coulter echoed this analysis.

“His (Lieberman's) message is basically ‘Republican good, Democrat bad,'” says Keith Crane, a member of the Bramford, Connecticut, town Democratic Committee.

Joe Lieberman ran a disingenuous re-election campaign. Much to their discredit, the citizens of Connecticut fell for it. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Lieberman is a conservative (and more of a Republican than an Independent):
Joe Lieberman is no friend to moderate middle-of-the-road Americans. He sucks up to this Administration and its supporters in the media. He has been a favorite of Fox News, since he has been so willing to go on the conservative channel and play the role of someone in the “opposition” party who bashes his fellow democrats. He has waged a surreptious war against the Democratic Party, by selectively lecturing Democrats on Iraq, on bi-partisanship, and so on. He parrots many right-wing talking points that some Republicans would be ashamed to utter and he has accepted the aid and support of Republicans who are running the country into the ground.

His closer relationship with the Bush is closer than most think. In December 2004 the White House "sounded him out" for the job of U.N. ambassador, says a source close to Lieberman, and although he declined the offer, he remains in regular contact with the Executive Branch. Before Bush's State of the Union speech in January, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley brought in Lieberman for a private consultation with the President. Lieberman says he talks with or e-mails Hadley, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and White House legislative-affairs head Candida Wolff every week or two.

More telling, Lieberman has frequently aligned himself with some of the more notorious advocates of hard line U.S. policies. In 2002, Lieberman became an honorary co-chair, along with George Shultz and Sen. John McCain, of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy outfit spearheaded by a number of neo-con stalwarts, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Eliot A. Cohen.

Lieberman has a long history of joining forces with Republicans to support hawkish and interventionist defense policies. Throughout the 1990s, he supported Republican-led initiatives to ramp up efforts to build a missile defense system, becoming one of only a handful of Democrats to vote in 1995 against cutting spending for space-based missile defense programs. In 1998, he co-sponsored with McCain the Iraq Liberation Act, which made the overthrow of Saddam Hussein official U.S. policy (New York Times, December 10, 2005).

Lieberman serves as a “distinguished adviser” to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a supposedly nonpartisan think tank, formed shortly after 9/11 by “a group of visionary philanthropists and policymakers to engage in the worldwide war of ideas and to support the defense of democratic societies under assault by terrorism and militant Islamism.” Though visionaries include a who's who of neoconservatives, several of whom teamed up with Lieberman to support the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, including Perle, Kristol, Woolsey, and Kirkpatrick. Other prominent neoconservatives involved include Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, Gary Bauer, Newt Gingrich, Steve Forbes, and Jack Kemp.

Sensing a trend here? In 2004, Lieberman teamed up with the usual suspects to revive the Cold War-era anti-communist group, the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which Lieberman co-chairs with Woolsey, Kyl, and Shultz. Among the familiar names on the CPD's list of members are Gaffney, Cohen, Forbes, Gingrich, Kemp, and Kirkpatrick. At the June 2004 press conference announcing the rebirth of the CPD, Lieberman claimed the aim of the group was “to form a bipartisan citizens' army, which is ready to fight a war of ideas against our Islamist terrorist enemies, and to send a clear signal that their strategy to deceive, demoralize, and divide America will not succeed.”

After the 2006 election, Lieberman made yet another strange political decision. He announced that his new spokesman would be Marshall Wittmann, a former colleague at the Democratic Leadership Council, and whom the New York Times calls “one of the great ideological contortionists” (11/22/06). An idiosyncratic ideologue who has been associated with a bewildering array of political factions—including the Trotskyites, the neo-cons, the Christian Coalition, and various Republican politicians—Wittmann has long promoted efforts to push hard line policies in the Democratic Party as a senior fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute and the DLC.

Perhaps with Wittmann's colorful and diverse political background. Lieberman thinks he has all his bases covered. Or then again, maybe in Wittman, Lieberman has found someone as politically unstable or opportunistic as he is.

The Caucus Game:
Democratic voters in Connecticut abandoned him in last year’s primary, favoring the antiwar candidate Ned Lamont. Lieberman ran as an independent, and beat the ineffectual Lamont in the general election in large part because Republicans voted for him. In the campaign, Lieberman said that he would join the Democratic caucus if elected, and his victory was the deciding one that gave the Democrats control of the Senate. But he told reporters recently that his attachment to the Party is based in some measure on sentiment, and should not necessarily be thought of as eternal.

A few days after the 2006 election, Lieberman appeared on Meet The Press. Lieberman left open the vague possibility that he may one day switch parties to the GOP. Regarding the prospect, he said, "I'm not ruling it out but I hope I don't get to that point."

In his 18 years in the U.S. Senate, Lieberman has cultivated an image of himself as a lonely, rare Washington official who places principle above politics. But with the Democrats' tenuous hold on power often dependent on his vote and with Republicans courting him to tilt the balance in their favor, Lieberman has been indulging in some fairly immodest political footsie. Early in 2007 he terrified fellow Democrats by skipping several of the weekly caucus lunches that cement party fidelity in the Senate. He was also spotted in the Republican cloakroom talking with South Carolina's Lindsey Graham about reforming Social Security. He even says he might vote Republican for President in 2008, a not-so-veiled hint that he would prefer John McCain, his fellow true believer in the Iraq war, to most, perhaps all, Democratic alternatives.

Meanwhile, the DailyKos notes that Lieberman will "caucus with whoever can offer him the best deal." According to the Associated Press, an recent internal memo from a senior Lieberman aide to top staffers read, "We should discuss his schedule when he's in DC and whether it makes sense to go to Caucus events, etc. or not."

Kos writes, "Party leaders who try to play nice with him are being played for suckers. Lieberman already turned back on promises to stick with the Democratic Party in return for their support in the primary, and there's nothing he could say that he wouldn't toss by the wayside if it wasn't in his interest."

Joe Lieberman’s loyalty lies with Joe Lieberman, and he long ago learned that the beltway media swoons for a “maverick” Democrat who is, whenever it matters, a “Republican.”

And now he's talking of supporting a Republican for president because - what? - we haven't had enough Republican control of our country the past six years?

Delusional.

Or as one blogger put it, "First time I’ve heard that a rat jumped on to a sinking ship…"

His 15 minutes are over?
Lieberman is a deeply religious man who takes his faith seriously, but there are times when he seems to wander across the line that separates piety from sanctimony.

Holier-than-thou Joe Lieberman is one of those rare breeds among our elected officials who come to think of themselves as part of the ruling class; entitled through some sort of self perceived superiority to continue in office.

The Connecticut voters allowed it. But when the politicians behavior gets to be so smug and self-righteous, we collectively bitch slap them at the ballot box. That's what happened to Lieberman in the primary.

Apparently Lieberman's reputation of being an annoying, moralistic scold, a moralistic jackass rubbed Democratic voters the wrong way. So they voted him out only to have the Republicans and a few idiots on the Democratic side sweep him back into office. He's a William Buckley Democrat which is an oxymoron if I ever wrote one. Now with his victory, Lieberman sees himself as a power broker, threatening to with hold his support from any Democrat who espouses an end to the Iraq war.

That's a dangerous game. I think--and hope-- his 15 minutes are almost over.

Lieberman’s influence over the national political debate is waning – a decline that none of the Sunday morning windbags--thanks Calvin Trillin-- foresaw last November.

The truth is that all front-running Democratic candidates, all of whom favor a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, are doing well ignoring Mr. Lieberman’s electoral prescription. With President Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, thanks to Iraq and a series of failed domestic policies, the next election is the Democrats’ to lose.

It’s now apparent that they need nothing more than that from him. Republicans have labored to portray Mr. Lieberman’s defeat in last year’s Senate primary as evidence that the Democratic Party has been over-run by weak-kneed and vulnerable on foreign policy and national security issues.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have noted, that game is over. In years past, a public association with Lieberman was helpful to Democrats, a reassurance to a more hawkish electorate that they were as “tough” as the G.O.P. But in 2007, embracing Lieberman’s intransigence is a decided political liability – evidenced most startlingly by a recent poll that found that even 58 percent of Republicans in Iowa want a troop withdrawal in the next six months.

When Holy Joe uses a national television interview to dust off old attacks on the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credentials while at the same time actually declaring that “the surge is working,” it only benefits his former party’s standing with the war-wary public. There are few, if any Democrats, quaking at his threat to endorse a Republican in ’08.

Greenwald said it very well in Salon. "Those who compose that entrenched Beltway power establishment — the endlessly reelected political officials, the hordes of consultants and lobbyists who feed off and control them, and the pampered, self-loving “journalists” who enable it all — are characterized by a single-minded quest to perpetuate their own power, flavored by a thinly masked contempt for the masses on whose behalf this system ostensibly plods along. Lieberman’s conduct last night was a perfect textbook for all of those afflictions.

Like the establishment mavens who rushed to defend him, Lieberman exposed himself as a man driven by a single, overarching motivation — a desperate desire to cling to his source of power, his Senate seat, not because of any political ideals he wants to pursue but solely because of the personal satisfaction, attention and benefits it provides him. Embodying one of the defining attributes of the permanent Beltway class, Lieberman plainly craves — has become addicted to — the petty trappings of his role in the grand Beltway court. The only cause that seems to stir Joe Lieberman to anger, aggression and confrontation is the glorious struggle for Joe Lieberman to cling to his Senate seat."

Lieberman is of course oblivious to evolving political landscape. "I haven't changed," Lieberman explained to Dan Balz of the Washington Post. "Events around me have changed."

As Balz wrote, "Lieberman's friends and allies have watched this drama play out with differing emotions -- both a sense of sadness that someone they have long respected has been caught in the vise of the Iraq war and a sense of alarm that he either ignored the warning signs or was somehow incapable or unwilling to adjust to them."

We're tired of Joe Lieberman and his threats. Let's hope for a clear Democratic victory and sweeping of the Senate chamber so Lieberman can get the treatment he so richly deserves--being ignored. Personally I think of him as much a traitor as a hypocrite. With all good luck, a clear majority would marginalize his importance and reduce him to being the impotent pariah that he is.

And that impotence may wake up other voters to the painful lesson of believing a career politician who would do and say anything to be reelected.

Axis of Assholes: Joe Lieberman (Part I)

I have a confession: I've never much liked the junior senator from Connecticut Joe Lieberman. I've always been skeptical of Lieberman's unctuous posing and preening on the political stage as he moralizes and lectures the rest of us on our own very real shortcomings. But like so many other holier-than-thou moralizers on the right, Lieberman has his own issues that contradict his very public persona.

Now we are all full of contradictions but Lieberman's actions rarely dovetail with his holier-than-thou grandstanding. Or, then again perhaps it is his vicious and reactionary nature that I find so disturbing, whether it be from his right-wing culture warring against Hollywood to his sandbagging of Clinton's health care initiative in 1994 (hey Hartford IS the insurance capital after all) to his fights with Arthur Levitt over at the SEC to ensure dubious accounting loopholes which would benefit his contributors to his sanctimonious lecturing of President Clinton on Monica Lewinsky (piously declaring in the Senate that he was "personally angry" about Clinton's "immoral" and "disgraceful" behavior) to his undermining of the Gore campaign in 2000 (could Lieberman not get his nose up Cheney's ass fast enough?) and the Kerry campaign in 2004 (when he expressed support for President Bush two weeks before the election while chastising Kerry for not supporting Israel enough).

But I really think it is the more recent behavior that I find so disturbing: his blind support of Iraq while suggesting his detractors are guilty of "cutting and running", his decrying of ‘Terrible, Partisan, Political Sniping,’ while cozying up to Fox News and the likes of O'Reilly (way too many foolish comments to include here), Hannity (who has described Harry Reid as “a propaganda minister for our enemies.”) and the anti-semite Coulter (The media is “treasoness," “the Democrats, they want us to lose,” the 9/11 widows are ’self-obsessed’ while accusing them of ‘enjoying their husband’s deaths and her latest, calling for the perfection of the Jews) and more recently, the pathetic rebuke of Moveon.org and its supporters for its provocative challenge to General David Petraeus.

The simple point is Lieberman is not and was never the stalwart and principled man that his supporters believe him to be. I don't know what drives this man but I've broken down my own problems with Lieberman issue by issue. Apologies for the length of this piece but it really speaks volumes to what I see as the hypocritical nature of this so-called principled man, Holy Joe. For a little man, Joe Lieberman really is one huge asshole.

Iraq:
Let's start with something very important, the big issue of the day. Like many of the other neo con enablers of the Iraq war, Joe Lieberman is another without any form of military service listed on his resume. But like so many others he happily commits men and women to fight overseas without fully realizing the consequences of his actions. So like Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz and others Lieberman is a chicken hawk. For the record, Lieberman did not serve in the military and, like his buddy Dick Cheney, received a college and family exemption. That's kind of relevant for what follows...

Lieberman is obscenely obsessed about supporting the Iraq War: he has remained a firm and optimistic supporter, in spite of the ever-increasing evidence that the war has been poorly handled since its start and the fact that our soldiers are in harms way as we witness a civil war unfold. Lieberman was not bothered by the absence of WMD, by the Bush's Administrations' evolving raison d'etre for being there or the fact that the war continues to drag on with no end (or even end strategy) in sight. Instead he blithely parrots the Bush party line.

He was the lead Democratic co-sponsor of the 2002 Senate resolution authorizing the war, and seems to have had no second thoughts. Indeed, it is impossible to find a Republican who is quite as sunny about Iraq’s future as Lieberman is. Even McCain, who supports the war and the surge, is openly frustrated with the Administration’s prosecution of the war, and has been especially critical of Cheney. Lieberman won’t criticize anyone involved but the comprehensively discredited former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And he would only do it AFTER Rumsfeld had been fired.

For me, Lieberman’s most annoying quality is not his early support for the war—Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards, among other senators, voted for the Iraq-war resolution. It is that no development—not the absence of weapons of mass destruction, or the Administration’s innumerable and well-documented mistakes in post-invasion Iraq—has lessened his admiration for President Bush or his belief that the war has aided America in its fight against Islamic terrorism. That's just so mindless. And so wrong. If nothing, this fight has made us only more vulnerable to attack. We now have more enemies of our state. Iraq is a recruiting poster for Al Qaeda and other terrorists. Are we safer? No. Is Israel safer? Hardly! One can not ignore the tremendous amount of worldwide public sympathy after 9/11 that Bush squandered, leaving us more isolated and alienated. We can give Joe Lieberman an assist on that.

And now that the NY Times has finally come to its senses and outed the ethically challenged Judith Miller (for those with short term memory loss, Cheney used his aide Scooter Libby to plant stories in the New York Times by co-opting the ambitious but gullible Miller and then the administration would point to them as evidence that even left wing media believed their crap), Lieberman has sadly become the go-to whore who Cheney now uses to defend his and Bush's plans for further escalating the war in Iraq.

In Newsweek interview earlier this year, Cheney was quoted, " I thought that Joe Lieberman's comments ... were very important. Joe basically said the plan deserved an opportunity to succeed ... that we're sending Gen. Petraeus out with probably a unanimous or near-unanimous [confirmation] vote, and that it didn't make sense for Congress to simultaneously then pass a resolution disapproving of the strategy in Iraq."

And Lieberman is so relentless with his misguided views that even the mainstream media is questioning his judgment. The July 2 issue of Newsweek was more than a bit skeptical: "Early last week, a distressing, if not entirely unsurprising, Newsweek poll found that fully 40 percent of American adults continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. It must, then, have been this exasperating chunk of the electorate that Joe Lieberman had in mind when he declared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Democrats are doomed in the 2008 presidential race unless they re-embrace the Iraq War."

Huh? The Democrats need to embrace the war to win the election? But wait a minute, most Americans favor an end to the conflict. Oh never mind.

The article continues, quoting the man himself and ends with a less than subtle dig: “I think that’s the best tradition of our party, and if we don’t recapture it ... the Democratic candidate is going to have a hard time winning that election next year,” Lieberman said, likening his own hawkish Iraq posture to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of them much too deceased to protest such a questionable comparison."

To top it all off, if losing to the Republicans isn’t enough, Mr. Lieberman also made clear that any Democratic nominee who favors “retreat” risks losing his personal endorsement.

Oh I'm sure the candidates are all so worried that the opportunistic junior Senator will withhold his support. With any luck, his support will soon be meaningless, the proverbial fart in a windstorm.

The Surge:
It follows if the man loves the war, he loves the surge. Since Lieberman thinks the war in Iraq is going well, naturally he supported the Bush/McCain "surge" plan which escalated the war by sending in more troops.

In CSPAN’s coverage of the McCain/Lieberman “surge” party at the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank), Lieberman praised Bush as a “great leader” for bucking American opinion, as expressed in the 2006 election, in his determination to double down in Iraq. Lieberman then said something really shameful: Even those opposed to the surge, he said, “ought to at least let us try it.”

“The worst that could happen,” he continued, is that this policy could become another partisan flashpoint in Washington.

The worst that could happen? I think not. The worst that could happen is thousands more US soldiers come home in body bags, not to mention the Iraqi casualties and the further damage--if this is possible--to the American reputation worldwide.

The worst that could happen is that thousands more Americans will die before moralistic paper tigers like Lieberman figure out what the rest of us already know: that this war was lost from the get go because it was run by chicken hawks like yourself who had no idea what they were doing.

Lieberman continuously asks for our patience, to let the strategy unfold and work. But it isn't. The surge he supports isn't working, despite Petraeus' cherry picked statistics and the Bush Administration blather.

Asking us to wait and listen to the generals is more than a bit ironic because if Bush and other neo cons like Lieberman had actually listened to the generals in the first place (Colin Powell, Eric Shinseki among others), then we never would have gotten into this war in the first place. So the hypocritical Lieberman stands on very infirm ground when he sternly lectures us on listening to the generals when he himself never did.

In early 2007, Lieberman went to Iraq, sporting more armament than Michael Dukakis driving a tank in 1988. He went to a market and proclaimed it safe though journalists pointed out there were no customers and the market was opened only as a photo op for Lieberman's visit.

Wearing a pair of sunglasses newly purchased from an Iraqi market, Lieberman said, “Overall, I would say what I see here today is progress, significant progress from the last time I was here in December. And if you can see progress in war that means you’re headed in the right direction.”

As ThinkProgress noted, several U.S. soldiers confronted him with a very different message: “We don’t feel like we’re making any progress.” The soldiers wanted to know, “When are we going to get out of here?” Lieberman chose to ignore them.

Upon his return he spoke to Anderson Cooper at CNN. "The war is not lost in Iraq" he said. "In fact, now American Iraqi security forces are winning. The enemy is on the run in Iraq. But, here in — in Congress, in Washington, we seem to be, or some — some members seem to be on the run, chased, I fear, by public opinion polls."

Or, on the other hand members like Lieberman might simply be delusional. Time Magazine reporter Michael Ware, who has covered Iraq for years, was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on CNN challenged Lieberman's rosy view.

When asked by Cooper if the enemy is indeed on the run in Iraq, Ware
declared categorically: "No, certainly not. And I think we need to be aware that it’s enemies. I mean, America doesn’t face just one opponent in this country, but a whole multitude, many of whom are becoming stronger, the longer the U.S. occupation here, or presence here, in Iraq continues. So, unfortunately, I’m afraid that Senator Lieberman has taken an excursion into fantasy."

Ouch! Is Lieberman living on the same planet we're living on?

Abu Ghraib:
If nothing defines the loss of American moral standing in the world, it is the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib. When the Abu Ghraib story broke with evidence that American soldiers were torturing prisoners of war, it at first appeared that the Senate Republicans might buck tradition and mount a serious inquiry. The Armed Services Committee, which had oversight responsibility for the issue, included several Republican moderates as well as independent-minded conservative Lindsey Graham who was visibly horrified by the revelations. So you'd think this would be a perfect opportunity for the junior senator to remind us of our ethical or moral obligations.

But no. Instead Lieberman minimized the importance of the affair from the start, purposefully ignoring the ugly truth of Abu Ghraib to make a political point. In his opening statement, Lieberman said he could not “help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, never apologized,” a dubious argument carefully culled from the right-wing talk-radio handbook. He continued, “And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah awhile ago never received an apology from anybody.”

And so the saintly Joe Lieberman, with a few short words, became the Senate's leading apologist for torture.

Iran:
With the death of 3500 soldiers on its hands, the blood of over 30000 wounded on its hands, the deaths of countless Iraqis on its hands, the destabilization of Iraq specifically and the entire Middle East generally on its hands, and with the tattered reputation of America isolated and alone on its hands, the neo-con movement that beat the drums of war is losing credibility.

Americans want out of Iraq. Polls show that 59 percent or more of Americans are in favor of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

With the results of 2006 mid term elections, the American public marked neo-conservatism as a fatally flawed foreign policy. However its adherents like Lieberman are not going quietly into the night. Realizing that the end of the Bush presidency means an end to the neo-conservatism for a long while, the neo-cons are planning one last hurrah. And that is poised to take place in Iran.

The republicans run on fear. The 2004 Presidential election was about fear. Rudy Guiliani's entire campaign is based on fear, running--as others have noted--for President of 9/11. So now that the Iraq war is a disaster, the powers that be want to find us a new enemy, so they can strike fear into our hearts once again. That fear is Iran.

The British daily The Sunday Telegraph (a conservative-leaning newspaper I should add) wrote, "Senior American intelligence and defense officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran."

That crazed neo-con inner circle, led by Cheney, wants us to attack Iran. And of course they found an ally in Joe Lieberman who has been quite vocal in urging military strikes against Iran. Earlier this year Lieberman appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation, that the U.S. should “be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.” “If there’s any hope” of stopping Iran’s nuclear program, “we can’t just talk to them. … We’ve got to use our force and to me that would include taking military action.”

So quietly, Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., filed an amendment to the 2008 Defense Reauthorization bill that gives a wink and a nod to the White House for the anticipated invasion if Iran.

The amendment proclaims "that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

The Senate, therefore, should "support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments, in support of the policy described ... with respect to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

It is non-binding, but it is a "sense of the Senate" amendment basically saying the Senate views Iran as a danger to our war in Iraq, and that it is permissible for the president to use everything at his fingertips to oppose Iran, including military options, which means bombing and war.

Many Americans from all parts of the political spectrum are nervous about this saber rattling. Many generals including General John Abizaid, who retired from being in charge of the Iraq war in May, are on record as being against attacking Iran. On the conservative love fest TV news program known as the McLaughlin Group, Abizaid said he doubted Iran would ever attack the U.S., and he went on to say "Iran is not a suicide nation. They may have some people in charge that don't appear to be rational, but I doubt that the Iranians intend to attack us with a nuclear weapon. ...There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran. Let's face it. We lived with a nuclear Soviet Union. We've lived with a nuclear China. We're living with nuclear other powers as well."

This summer Lieberman wrote an op-ed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “[E]very leader [in Washington] has a responsibility to acknowledge that…the Iranian government…has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East.” He argues that the use of force against Iran is needed for one primary reason — to temper Iran’s “expansionist” desires to “dominate” its neighbors. He also argues that:

• Iran is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine moderate regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power and reshape the region in its own ideological image.

• …[Iran] hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate [neighboring] states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S.

Sound familiar? Yeah probably because you've seen them before. Lieberman used nearly identical talking points to retroactively justify the U.S invasion of Iraq. In early 2004, after the search for WMDs proved fruitless, Lieberman argued that without U.S. intervention, Iraq would have embarked on its own campaign to dominate the “Arab world”:

• I believe that [Iraq] developed [weapons of mass destruction] to use them against their neighbors. I’m talking about the Iraqis, their neighbors in the Arab world and the Persian Gulf.

• Remember that Saddam was very clear that he had a plan. And the plan was to become the emperor, if you will, of the Arab world, to make Baghdad the capital of the Arab world.

Lieberman was wrong then and he is just as wrong now. Fortunately for us, Lieberman is standing increasingly alone — according to a recent poll, 72 percent of the American public “favor diplomacy to pressure with Iran.”

But Lieberman continues to beat the war drum. “The fact is that the Iranian government has by its actions declared war on us,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. While stopping short of advocating an immediate military strike, he claimed “our diplomatic efforts are only likely to succeed if backed by a credible threat of force.”

Gen. Wesley Clark responsed to Lieberman’s calls for attacking Iran, “Only someone who never wore the uniform or thought seriously about national security would make threats at this point. What our soldiers need is responsible strategy, not a further escalation of tensions in the region. Senator Lieberman must act more responsibly and tone down his threat machine.”

Why doesn't Joe Lieberman want to listen to the military this time? With the passage of Kyl/Lieberman, we can only conclude that war with Iran will face no opposition from the Senate.

Thanks Joe. Just what we need, another front.


(next: Part II looking at Lieberman on domestic and social issues)

Axis of Assholes: Rudy Guiliani (it's an on-going series)

Forget Republican presidential contender Rudolph W. Giuliani's bad comb over or his friendships with Enron's Ken Lay and Louisiana Senator and prostitute patron David Vitter.

Forget the fact New York hedge fund billionaire Paul E. Singer, a Guiliani confidant and one of the candidate's biggest donors, was the source of a mystery $175,000 donation to a stalled initiative proposal seen as an attempt to help the GOP win a portion of California's 55 electoral votes.

You can forget the fact that Guiliani likes to wear women's clothes or that he has been married three times (once to his second cousin) and guilty of carrying on at least one very public extra marital affair.

And forget that his kids are estranged from him as are many of his former political associates (it's a long list and doesn't even include Bernard Kerik)

This is about character and Rudolph W. Guiliani seems to come up appallingly short in that regard.

As some one else famously said, "To know Rudy is to hate Rudy". His political career was virtually over until 9/11 happened. Up until 9/11, Guiliani was on his way to being an asterisk; completely irrelevant politically, in the midst of a very public affair with the social climbing princess Judy Nathan while his wife and children waited for him at Gracie Mansion. Most people I know who lived in NYC (including me) hated him. My issues with him go back to his changing parties (yeah Rudy used to be a Democrat) and becoming a Republican on through to his stewardship of NYC. And the way his private life played out so badly makes me wonder if he is either obtuse or simply delusional--neither of which makes for a decent president as we now know from the frat boy-in-chief.

Guiliani has an over-sized ego which requires him to take credit for things that he did not do. Rudy got into a snit with Chief William Bratton and fired him. Bratton was the architect of the local community policing initiative which reduced crime in NYC (and elsewhere) and quite earned credit for his work. Rudy's ego was bruised so he fired him. Apparently Bratton was getting far too much--and Rudy not enough--credit for the local policing initiative and so forth. And of course it didn't help Rudy's ego when Bratton moved to LA and turned the police department around there as well. One has to give Rudy credit for hiring Bratton in the first place but one wonders if Rudy's ego is too fragile to have the best and the brightest in the White House. Rudy isn't JFK that is for sure. Kennedy gave us Ted Sorensen, Rudy gave us the ethically challenged ex-chauffeur Bernard Kerik.

Like his estranged (starting to sense a theme here?) former friend Alphonse D'Amato, Rudy never saw a camera he didn't love. So he has never missed an opportunity to promote himself, even to the point of looking ridiculous. Years ago Rudy and Alphonse "My mother dropped me on my head when I was a baby" D'Amato dressed up and went along on some sort of drug bust. They were inappropriately dressed, looking like two dorks out trick or treating on Halloween and looking very much the fools they actually are.

A far more serious Rudy problem is his off-handed comments about Ground Zero and so forth. Many firemen, policemen and emergency workers detest his grandstanding ("I spent as much time there as they did" which he later had to retract) and his apparent lack of concern about their health issues.

But most damning was his controversial decision to put the Office of Emergency Management’s command center at the WTC, even after if had been bombed in 1993. Many involved in the Office of Emergency Management had argued that the command center should be built in an underground bunker at the MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn. Guiliani overrode their objections and built it on the 23 floor of No. 7 World Trade Center, supposed based on the recommendation of Jerome Hauer, the first director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Now Hauer and Guiliani have had a very public falling out--yet another falling out for Guiliani-- so there's a good deal of finger pointing. Guiliani contends it was Hauer's idea. Hauer denies ever suggesting that venue. He argues it was Guiliani's call.

Guiliani is on record as saying that he wanted the command center within walking distance to City Hall. Then there is the inconvenient coincidence of a $100K campaign contribution from Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy to Guiliani's mayoralty campaign just months after the command center opened. They just happen to be the landlords of No. 7 World Trade Center.

Nice job Rudy. God knows how many lives were lost because of your laziness, your greed and your ego.

Guiliani blew it on the command center. It completely undermines his argument that he is the best candidate to confront or fight terrorism.

Of course Rudy has some other issues, mostly with the social conservatives who actually vote in the Republican primaries. He has had to shift or qualify his positions on a number of issues to appease the right wing. And, like the political whore that he is, Guiliani is happy to oblige, though I suspect he'd call it nuancing his position.

Which begs the question: why don't Guiliani's opponents and enemies (of which there are many) call him on it by running any of his TV commercials from his various campaigns or recycle any of the audio from his radio programs where he waxed negatively poetic about the NRA, the radical right and the evangelicals--the same people he is trying to suck up to right now?

Candidate Mitt Romney has the same problem (kind of hard to run as a pro-choice Republican in Massachusetts and then as an pro-life Republican just a few short years later), compounded by the fact that virtually no one think this country is ready to elect a Mormon, unless of course you are an Osmond.

If this race was strictly about character, Guiliani and Romney would be the big losers.

Petraeus, Moveon.org and the right wing nuts

The bull shit continues.

Because the right wing could not actually address the real issues behind General David Petraeus' flawed presentation on Capital Hill, they chose to go after Moveon.org for its New York Times ad which bluntly and correctly called his objectivity into question.

The right has villifed the ad and Moveon.org, reminding us of the uproar that surfaced after the Swift boating controversy when carefully orchestrated ad hominem attacks were made accusing John Kerry of lying about his military service.

One reader in the Los Angeles Times (10/4 A General Under Attack) tried to justify the swift boaters, suggesting the difference between swift boating John Kerry and attacking General David Petraeus is that the former was running for office and the latter is not, that General Petraeus was "above" (my words) the political fray.

But this is absolute crap.

According to the very reputable English newspaper The Independent (Sept 13, 2007), Petraeus is on record as saying that he wants to follow the General Dwight D. Eisenhower path to the White House and run for President, though not in 2008. If so, Petraeus is looking to protect his reputation and resume. One can therefore reasonably question his motivations about putting the best face on Iraq. As The Independent itself noted, "General Petraeus's open interest in the presidency may lead critics to suggest that his own political ambitions have influenced him in putting an optimistic gloss on the US military position in Iraq."

For example, why did he write an op-ed piece in the Washington Post just days before the 2004 election, arguing that substantial progress was being achieved in Iraq.

Here's what the general said in 2004. "They (the troops) will have the benefit of a substantially larger Iraqi security presence coming on line. This is an occasion where we'll see how the new Iraqi security forces are going to do. I think they'll be fine." And later, "We're only six months away from June and handing control of the country back over to Iraqis."

We can debate whether this was an outright lie or a completely inept reading of the military situation, but the fact remains that neither of these scenarios is really acceptable. Petraeus is either a liar or an incompetent fool. This cheerleading smacks of "Mission Accomplished" and calls into question Petraeus's motivation. Why in the world would he write this? It seems likely that Petraeus was and is carrying water for the Bush Administration as it stumbles with Iraq, thus calling into question anything the general has to say on the topic. And so, Petraeus opens himself up as a legitimate target for criticism.

To its credit, the American public seems unswayed by the cherry-picked statistics, bar graphs and other "data" used to make Iraq seem less dangerous than it actually is. Of course the Polish Ambassador might readily agree with the US citizens, after narrowly escaping a bomb in Baghdad with his life earlier in the week.

Curiously while the media weighs in on the aftermath of the Moveon.org ad and the Limbaugh controversy, it has essentially not done its diligence on General David Petraeus who went to Iraq in 2003, never having seen combat.

As The Independent noted, for this general, whose military abilities and experience are so lauded by the White House, has had a surprisingly controversial career in Iraq. His critics hold him at least partly responsible for three debacles: the capture of Mosul by the insurgents in 2004; the failure to train an effective Iraqi army and the theft of the entire Iraqi arms procurement budget in 2004-05.

These are no small debacles. The loss of Mosul in 2004 happened when 7000 Iraqi police recruited by Petraeus either changed sides (yes you read that right--changed sides) or went home. Thirty police stations were captured, 11,000 assault rifles were lost and $41m worth of military equipment disappeared. The general's next job was to oversee the training of a new Iraqi army. We all know how well that went with the Iraqi army being both ineffective AND corrupt. And later Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command at the time that the Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2bn was stolen. Yes stolen.

Why is this administration putting this guy up to sell us a bill of goods? My guess is he is the only general willing to parrot the Bush/Cheney line on Iraq. Why have we not heard or read any of this in the US media? Probably because the syncophants and news readers who masquerade as journalists haven't done their homework. The media incompetence continues.

There is one major truth when comparing the swift boaters and the Moveon.org ad: the swiftboaters were lying and misrepresenting the truth; the Moveon.org people were not.

One more thought: The rightwing nuts' indignation over the ad is pretty dubious for two reasons: for one, they are the instigators of scorched earth political attacks so their thin skin is both laughable and pathetic and secondly, Bush paid no attention whatsoever to the Generals who argued against invading Iraq (Colin Powell) or those who contended many more ground forces were needed (Bush forced General Eric Shinseki to retire). So this piety over attacking a man in uniform apparently only applies to those who agree with the Moron-In-Chief, not those who have the courage to speak truth to power.

Finally, most of the lunatic fringe going after Moveon.org have their own issues. The truth is the Iraq war was initiated by a bunch of guys who never fought and never served their country. The number of VietNam war deferments available to Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rove, Ashcroft and others has been well documented as has Bush's AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. I should point that these deferments were not available to the general public; only to the sons of rich affluent Republicans (you know, the ones who supported the war). So when Bill Clinton uses his college status as a proper deferment, he is labeled a draft dodger. Curiously Cheney, Rove and others who used the same are not.

One wonders if these assholes would be so willing to commit young American lives to combat had they actually felt the flash of fire on their own backsides?

Axis of Assholes-Ralph Nader

Thanks Ralph!

Rumor has it that Ralph Nader is once again considering yet another presidential run, especially if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination. Does the man have no shame at all?

Nader USED to be a good guy. His expose of GM and the Corvair Unsafe at Any Speed made automobile manufacturers more responsive to the safety issues they had essentially ignored. We have seat belts and safer cars because of Nader. He warned us of the dangers of nuclear energy. His work contributed to the creation of the Environmental Protection Act, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. His Nader's Raiders looked out for the welfare of the American consumer, monitoring corporate abuse working alongside organizations like Public Citizen, Congress Watch, the Health Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety, and the Center for Responsive Law. He also started a network of campus-based organizations called "PIRGS" -- Public Interest Research Groups -- that over the years has trained thousands of college students in the skills of citizen activism. I myself was a member of NYPIRG while a college student in upstate New York.

Ever since his initial battles with GM when he first became a public figure, Nader had the reputation for honesty and trustworthiness second to none.

But something went horribly wrong when Nader began his quixotic quest for the Presidency in 1996 and 2000, initially as the Green Party nominee and then later running in 2004 as an independent. Knowing that he would not and could not win, Nader pushed forward any way, essentially acting in the role of spoiler for the 2000 Bush/Gore Presidential race. Nader secured over 79000 votes in Florida. Despite hardball and ethically challenged moves by Florida Republicans with the encouragement of the Republican National Committee and a schizophrenic ruling by the US Sepreme Court (which essentially said, we believe in states rights but just not in this case because we want Bush to win and, btw, don't bother trying to cite this as a precedent in future cases), Gore "lost" Florida by under 600 votes. Those 25 electoral votes gave Bush the Presidency and condemned the US to four--later eight--years of grotesque incompetence.

One would think that Nader would feel some sort of guilt or remorse for enabling the disastrous president of the Frat-Boy-in-Chief and the incalculable damage the Bush administration has wrought.

No chance!

Nader rationalizes his behavior because he sees both the Democratic and Republican parties as essentially the same -- as tools of corporate America, which in Nader's myopic view is bad. So during the 2000 campaign, Nader argued that there was virtually no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Many of us knew then and virtually ALL of us know now that there was a huge difference between these two. With Gore, the war in Iraq would most likely never have happened. We would not have the loss of civil liberties, Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, the worldwide political ostracism, the attacks on stem cell research or global warming and the sanctioned assaults on our environment by unscrupulous corporate interests under the preposterously named Clean Water Bill. We would not have had the politicalization of the justice system, the packing of the Supreme Court with right wing idealogues, the ballooning of the national debt and tax cuts for the rich at the expense of federal programs for those who need it most.

On a theoretical level I can understand but can't agree with his thinking (for me all of corporate America is not evil) but we live in the real world where we have to make rational choices. Politics, like virtually everything else in life, is a compromise. We can fantasize about the ideal but the fact is we live in the real world so we are only left with the choice of the "lesser of two evils". Sure for progressives like myself, the Democrats fall far short but they pale in comparison to the Republicans who represent virtually everything that is wrong with this country.

Democrats at least pay lip service to caring about all Americans, not just the richest five per cent. Democrats do not lecture on family values while cheating on their wives or sodomizing Congressional pages. Democrats do not argue for war but then claim to be too busy to fight or desert their National Guard units which suggests a certain level of cowardice on their part. Democrats do not cry media bias or judicial activism even though they are the welcome recipients of such largess. Democrats do not start the scandalous negative campaigns from the likes of Richard Nixon or Lee Atwater and then cry foul when they get a taste of their own medicine. Modern day Democrats don't go to Mississippi (as Ronald Reagan did) and lament the loss of states rights (thus intentionally fomenting racism) while pretending to be the party of all Americans (the ubiquitous "big tent"). Democrats don't foam at the mouth about crime and punishment but when they transgress, expect to be held to a different (read: lighter) standard. Democrats don't lament about the dangers of big government while encouraging it to pry into the privates lives of its citizens. In short the Democrats are not as much the party of greedy perverts and hypocrites as the Republicans are. But even more significantly, Nader fails to distinguish between those who see government as good and a safety net for its citizens and those who see government as unchecked and evil.

Like Ross Perot, Barry Commoner and John Anderson, Nader talked of building a permanent progressive third party movement but it never happened, in part because of the realities of the American political landscape (money talks, winner-takes-all and the decided lack of media exposure for anything beyond the two principal parties) but also because Nader never devoted himself to the difficult and decidedly unsexy task of party-building. Instead of running as a Democrat in the primaries and shaping the debate while drawing attention to his causes like the current MoveOn.org, Nader chose to go it alone.

Curiously Candidate Nader also took up another odd, provocative and in my mind indefensible position. He would not release his financial records as virtually every candidate in the past 20 years has. He continues to refuse to do so. What is Nader hiding? Why won't he be accountable to the American public whose support he covets?

George Bush did not win the 2000 or 2004 presidential elections. They were stolen for him by the malevolent forces that really run this country, the shadow government. Ralph Nader helped them do it.

Yeah, I know the arguments. Nader supporters tell us that Gore ran a bad campaign--in fact he did--and that he could not win his own home state of Tennessee. We can look at the Bush/Harris activities in Florida and bitch about the Supreme Court decision but the truth is none of that would have mattered if Nader had done the right thing. Sure some Nader supporters would have stayed home, but most would have voted for Gore. Nader only had to release his votes in the swing states to assure a Gore victory and Gore would have prevailed in the electoral college, not just in the popular vote.

It is also no secret that the Republicans found a willing ally in Nader. They cynically contributed money to his campaigns in order to help Nader divert votes away from Gore and Kerry and tip the elections to Bush. Their strategy worked. What is troubling to me is that Nader actually took the money. In fact he welcomed it. Nader, who so zealously fought to protect the American consumer in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, completely sold his soul by taking this Republican money to advance his own egotistical cause.

I honestly can't imagine why Nader is considering yet another run. Most Americans learned from the 2000 debacle. His vote total dropped from almost 2.9 million votes to just under 464,000 in 2004. Yes, I do hope Hillary is not the Democratic candidate because I think she is too beholden to corporate interests, too conservative, too unwilling to admit errors and too incapable of actually leading. I'm hoping for some combination of Obama and Edwards. Still if confronted with Hillary versus any Republican I will hold my nose and pull the lever next to her name.

I feel sorry for Nader, once a hero to and a mentor to many activists, who now has now become the latter day Harold Stassen, the constantly inept and hopeless Republican candidate from Pennsylvania.

Because he has allowed his ego to overrule his common sense and better judgment, Ralph Nader has joined the Axis of Assholes. He may not have as much blood on his hands as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell but make no mistake. Ralph Nader is in part responsible and as much as he denies it, he has the blood of thousands of Americans and countless Iraqis on his hands.

Hardly a fitting epitaph for a guy who did so much for so many. But shame on him!