Truth Has a Well Known Liberal Bias

Experts, pundits, and concerned citizens have looked at the various stages of Joe Lieberman's candidacy through an assortment of frames, some more accurate than others. The most popular, and least accurate, frame among the establishment set is that rabid bloggers and single issue war opponents who want to commit party suicide like McGovern did railroaded an honorable public servant out of office. Never mind that nobody got up in arms over how right next door, moderate Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) was 'primaried' from the right, an habitual practice by far-right groups like the Club for Growth that has been a major contributor to the increasing polarization of Congress over the last decade or so.

At any rate, from my understanding of blogger and progressive motives, Lieberman has not been targeted because of any one position, including his support for the occupation of Iraq. There are plenty of Democrats, even Senators, and even up for re-election this year (Cantwell comes to mind), who are for the war and who have not been targeted by the party's left. No, the fundamental problem we have with Lieberman is that he's full of crap.

Lieberman (CfL-CT) does not just support the war, he supports Bush's insane unitary executive theories for its justification and props up the president in so doing. Not only does Lieberman pull this kind of garbage today, he was also a key supporter of the Republican witch hunt of Clinton (that right-wingers are now blaming Clinton for allowing himself to be distracted from focusing on Bin Laden) and a key mole in the Democrats' unified opposition to Bush's social security fiasco. In general, my point here is that Democrats as a party are weaker for letting Lieberman associate himself with us.

Now, it is pretty well established at this point among those who pay attention that discourse in good faith is impossible with the Republican party - Bush uses straw man arguments to bolster his own rhetorically weak positions, Congressional leaders often refuse to even allow Democratic amendments and bills to be debated, and so forth. So what do we have instead? We have Jim Webb.

Webb is running as a Democrat for George Allen's (R-VA) Senate seat, and fortunately Allen is doing all he can to help. This is particularly notable because Webb was in Reagan's cabinet as a Republican. Webb enjoys a lot of support from the blogosphere, and it's (obviously) not because he's a fringe liberal. It's because he's a sensible guy who has decided that if you want anybody to look at the merits of a proposal in good faith, you have to go with the Democrats.

So, support for Webb is not a contradiction for the people who fought Lieberman - it is a logically consistent position. We didn't fight Lieberman because he wasn't an ideological doppelganger of ourselves, we fought him because he's a terrible human being. Democrats today are doing all they can to be the party of reason and at least some measure of intellectual honesty, and that is why no matter what happens in Connecticut this November, we win for having dumped Lieberman.