...then throw the blockchain into the Laurentian Abyss, along with the ABC News bookers and producers who thought it was a great idea to give this noxious fossil air time on a national news network.
Former Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) of @NoLabelsOrg discusses his new book, "The Centrist Solution: How We Made Government Work and Can Make It Work Again.
— Washington Journal (@cspanwj) October 20, 2021
Watch live! https://t.co/DTGHL1421C pic.twitter.com/xVsGHHqLNG
Holy Joe still has all the buzzy words. and clicky phrases that all the kids love!
Centrists.
Centrists in both parties.
The Center.
Centrism.
Compromise.
Settle for less than 100%.
Work across party lines.
The media has become partisan.
Democrats are constantly and are too often living in fear of a challenge from the Left. Republicans are doing the same, challenge from the Right.
Leaders like President Reagan and President Clinton...
I've been working for this organization called "No Labels" to thwart Republican and Democrat...
I get a bad rap for Obamacare...
And from deep inside a weed-choked Newsmax/World Wide News/Substack tomb --
-- comes the sound of a tiny, spectral boner popping to life.
America's elite gelatinous Both Siderists have always needed a leader. Someone in the vanguard who could be counted on when the going got tough and the votes got thin to absolutely fuck over their fellow Democrats every time, while swaddling themselves in the greasy rags of pious non-partisanship.
For a time, Holy Joe Lieberman was the patron saint of these wormy little men, and among his many molestations of self-government, for me these stand out. You probably have others.
Holy Joe almost singlehandedly screwing Al Gore out of the White House in 2000.
Holy Joe buddying up to dominionist lunatic "Pastor" John Hagee, who believed a whole lot of depraved nonsense including that Adolf Hitler was fulfilling God’s will by driving the Jews to Israel. However because one of the preconditions of Hagee's End Times retirement plan was the restoration of Israel (so that they can either convert or be slaughtered because Jebus) Holy Joe looked that bugfuck madman in the eye ad saw not just a true friend, but a modern day Moses!
Holy Joe continuing his unstinting support for George W. Bush (while shivving members of his own party in the back) long after it was clear that the Iraq War was a debacle which we had been lied into by despicable men.
Holy Joe volunteering to be a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2008.
Holy Joe holding the Affordable Care Act hostage to his monkeywrenching which is why it had to be passed as a rickety mess with no public option.
America's elite gelatinous Both Siderists were so enamored of Holy Joe's good works that when Tom Delay's predations became impossible for David Brooks to ignore, he had to resort to the mightiest weapon in the elite gelatinous Both Siderist arsenal.
First, he used his privileged position at The New York Times to invent a wholly imaginary threat that was the equal-and-opposite of Tom Delay. The "net-roots Delays" on the Left. Hey, that's you and me!
But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
This cleared the way for Mr. Brooks to deploy the Both Sides Do It lie to justify dreaming into existence a glorious Centrist Third Party -- a party built around Holy Joe Lieberman -- in order to solve a "problem" which Mr. Brooks had just invented out of whole cloth:
The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind. The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.
Ah but Holy Joe Lieberman was a rara avis indeed: a completely hollow political parasite who spent decades perfecting his smarmy sanctimony scam. Where to find another Democrat 100% willing to fuck his own party over at the moment when the party's legislative power hangs by the most delicate of threads
Comes now Holy Joe Manchin, who ran for the Senate in 2010 as an NRA-lovin', Obamacare-hatin', Big Coal-suckin' yahoo from the hollers of Wess Virginny!
Holy Joe Manchin, beloved of Never Trump Republicans because he shall be their firewall against the Democrats doing, well, anything.
Holy Joe Manchin, who would like you to know that you can have a $2000 COVID pandemic relief check --
Manchin on proposed round of $2K checks: 'Absolutely not'
-- when you pry it out of his cold, dead political career as the new Joe Lieberman.
Where have all the centrists gone? A look at why American politics is so dysfunctionalThis is followed by a picture of Holy Joe. But not this picture.
American politics is seeing the death of centrism — and it may be having disastrous effects
Centrism.
It’s not a term you hear a lot in American politics today. Consider President Donald Trump. Though he’s refusing to work with Democrats, the #resist movement is demanding that Democrats don’t work with him either.But a CNN/ORC poll from March found that 72 percent of Americans would prefer for Trump to forge bipartisan compromises on major legislation in order to bring about positive change, while 69 percent want to see Democrats work with the president. Yet statistics notwithstanding, centrism can be a death sentence for a politician.Consider Joe Lieberman...
Joe 'I'm not going to become a lobbyist' Lieberman becomes a lobbyistBut for the former leader and sole candidate of the "Connecticut for Lieberman" party, there is no sound quite so sweet as the sound of his own voice sermonizing about other people's moral failings, and so every few months he finds an excuse to open his prayer-hole and remind everyone why they hate him so very much.
You just said that you thought Trump could be a deal-maker. You said you want to keep your No Label hat on. Doesn’t it just seem like we’re at a moment where a bigoted and demagogic figure has emerged on the American political scene and that perhaps this is the time for No Labels to unite around the fact that this guy is a scary figure?
I got you. Here’s what I meant by keeping my No Label hat on. I’m being interviewed by you as the co-chair of No Labels. No Labels is a movement that has a purpose, which is to try to incentivize the two parties to begin to work together, compromise, and finally get something done and deal with the country’s problems before they become crises or catastrophes. There’s a separate question, and this is what I meant, about Joe Lieberman, Democrat, former senator, about what I’m going to do now. If you ask me personally, do I agree with the positions that Donald Trump has taken on a number of really important issues such as immigration, such as his comments on the judge …
Allowing Muslims in the country.
Yeah. I’d like to actually disagree with that. I like the articulation that Paul Ryan gave that there should be a security test, not a religious test. It should apply to everybody of any religion coming in. Right? But that’s me. That’s not No Labels. No Labels is ...
Huntsman endorsed though, that’s why I asked.
I don’t feel under any time pressure. We’ve got five months until the election.
Endorsements aside, I think a lot of people right now are freaked out about Trump. I’m just wondering whether you feel like a group like No Labels at this time loses some of its force because Trump himself is such a sui generis figure.
Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. He’s a very different case. It has sort of affected the No Labels purpose, but the No Labels purpose is unique and has value on its own. This is why we’re all focused on this 1787 conference we’re going to do in December, which we’re billing really as how do we begin to make peace now that the war is over.
You don’t seem terrified by the prospect that this guy could be president.
Well, I mean [laughs]. Here’s what I’m going to say today. I’m again trying to ... I understand the difficulty not only for me but for you in separating between Joe Lieberman individual and Lieberman co-chair of No Labels. I think the purpose of No Labels is so important that I am focused on it now.
...
Dead Center
Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!
Yay!
In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...
...and David Fucking Brooks?
And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?
What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is
the "No Labels Anthem"
But nothing we did not expect, right?
...
Manchin: I Won't Put Up With 'Bulls**t' If Dems Try To Obstruct GOPSen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) made in clear in an interview published Monday that he has no plans to support Democrats who want to take a page out of the GOP playbook by obstructing the new Republican majority."That's bullshi—…. I'm not going to put up with that," Manchin told Politico when discussing the prospect of Democrats blocking the Republican agenda over the next two years....
...
There are plenty of team players in government who do whatever the leader says. There are too few difficult members, who have complicated minds, unusual perspectives, the toughness to withstand the party-line barrages and a practical interest in producing results.
(Greenwald nails a few dozen more theses to that Villager Cathedral Door here:
...And Alex Pareen also has a few sprigs of cilantro to toss into the stew:
This is all just the small illustrative tip of the iceberg that is Joe Lieberman's hideous, destructive political career. It leaves out his alliance with the worst religious extremists in the country, such as Rev. John Hagee, his steadfast refusal as Homeland Security Chairman to investigate some of the Bush administration's worst failures and abuses, and -- of course -- his overarching, unyielding, blind support for anything and everything Israel does, even trying to construct similar absolute allegiance to Israel as a litmus test for American politicians. In a 2008 report, Think Progress compiled all the ways that this Democratic Hero has not only failed to support progressive values, but led the way in waging war on them, and this amusing Gail Collins column from yesterday perfectly captured Lieberman's rotted "character."
The evidence of Lieberman's usefulness is that he voted for various things the Democrats wanted him to vote for, eventually. But politics -- especially in the Senate -- is about more than the final vote. It's about the process. And Lieberman acted as poisonously as he could during the process of passing legislation like the healthcare reform bill. He helped drag it out and he killed the Medicare buy-in for no reason other than spite. Brooks knows this full well...)
