Lieberman speaks with forked tongue

Robert Scheer, fired from the Los Angeles Times by its Chicago Tribune owners for his consistent denunciation of the cheney administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, has an excellent post up.

Scheer calls the liars liars. We have come to expect politicians to dissemble and distort. I hold Lieberman with a special degree of contempt, and his protege Barak Obama also. Obama is sufficiently tainted by his closeness to Lieberman, but even absent that baggage, has shown his lack of character and convictions. Two examples:

Obama recanted on his statement that U.S. troops had died in vain in Iraq. Until or unless this nation's Presidents STOP waging war, every U.S. troop death has been in vain. The U.S. army and marine troops who died fighting in Korea died in vain. Each and every soldier's death in Viet Nam was in vain. This includes my Uncle Jim:

James Raymond Hockett

First Lieutenant Army Of The United States

PERSONAL DATA Home: Blue Island, Illinois DOB: Saturday, 10/27/1945 Sex: Male Race: Caucasian Married? Yes Religion: Methodist MILITARY DATA Service: Army Of The United States Comp: Reserve Grade: O2 Rank: First Lieutenant ID No: O5337539 MOS: 1542 - Infantry Unit Commander LenSvc: Between 3 and 4 years Unit: 25 INF DIV CASUALTY DATA Start Tour: Tuesday, 08/13/1968 Cas Date: Sunday, 09/22/1968 Age at Loss: 22 Remains: Body Recovered Location: Tay Ninh, South Vietnam Type: Hostile, Died Of Wounds Reason: Artillery, Rocket, Mortar - Ground Casualty Last Update: September 1969 ON THE WALL Panel 43W Line 063

The above tribute, some family photos, our memories of him, and the stories told by his widow to the grade school children she taught for 20+ years are his legacy. He could have accomplished quite a bit more. His death was in vain. In vain.

Strike two on Barak. At a fund raising dinner in New York City, Obama could not even say that SOMETIMES police use excessive force. Such a statement would not be a denunciation or indictment of every police officer in America. It would be a simple fact. A reality that can be changed, or at least lessened. But if one won't talk about injustice, one cannot expect for the injustice to go away. Only by speaking out, by taking action, have changes been made to curb the abuses of the powerful upon the less powerful, upon the most powerless.


Here are some excerpts from Scheer's commentary.

You have to hand it to Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., for having the chutzpah to cite the fiercely anti-American rally that dominated the anniversary of Iraq’s fourth year of U.S. occupation as evidence that the troop “surge” is working. ...

After a weekend in which 10 U.S. soldiers were killed—four more were killed on Monday, bringing the total to 45 already in April—and the citizens of once bustling Baghdad cowered in their homes under a U.S.-imposed round-the-clock curfew, President Bush had the good sense for once to say not a word about the glorious “liberation” of Iraq. ...

Meanwhile, back in liberated Iraq, the anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow was marked by only one sign of public response: In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, hundreds of thousands gathered to burn American flags and otherwise denounce the United States. “Yes! Yes! Iraq. No! No! America,” chanted demonstrators organized by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, reported the BBC. “We were liberated from Saddam. Now we need to be liberated again. Stop the suffering. Americans leave now.”

What part of “leave now” doesn’t Lieberman get? Speaking of the rally called by Sadr to blast the Americans as Iraq’s “archenemy” and to demand “that the occupiers withdraw from our land,” Lieberman surreally sought to find a silver lining of support for U.S. policy: “[Sadr] is not calling for a resurgence of sectarian conflict. He’s striking a nationalist chord. He’s acknowledging that the surge is working,” he said.

(MG) Those who consistently obfuscate to lie have no reasons to believe the straight talk of what others say. An expensive price to pay for lying is that you have no means to recognize a truth teller, nor any reason to believe such critters even exist.

Ugh. What tortured logic. Ponder that sentence for the sheer mendacity of its optimism, which conveniently ignores the fact that the nationalist chord is a stridently anti-American one. Yes, there were Sunni clerics in the Najaf march and Sadr’s followers heeded his call to wrap themselves, literally, in the Iraqi flag while shunning sectarian slogans—but what united them was the demand to end the U.S. occupation, which Lieberman so fervently supports.

So apparently the surge is working … to unite all Iraqis against us.

(MG) The emperor has no clothes. NO WONDER the MSM hates blogs so much. The writing style, conclusions formed on the basis of verifiable facts is anathema to the punditocracy, our press corpse, whores of the pen, and their corporate sponsors.

What irony: The final refuge of the scoundrels who sold us on this war, Lieberman included, was that although it could not be justified by claims that Saddam had WMD or an alliance with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, the invasion would implant American ideals of democracy on Iraqi soil. What is being implanted instead is a virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli nationalism, Sadr’s current cause, competing with a smoldering sectarian civil war, which this multitasking demagogue has also fueled. Yet, spinning like a top, Sen. Lieberman desperately finds solace in a resurgent Iraqi nationalism based on hatred of the United States.