Wrongheaded from start to finish

It has been a long time since I’ve read anything as wrongheaded as Jacob Weisberg’s piece in Slate today on Ned Lamont’s primary win. Let’s start with this masterful observation:  

The election was about one issue and one issue only: the war in Iraq. Joe Lieberman was an otherwise highly regarded, well-ensconced Democratic incumbent who would never have faced a meaningful primary challenge had he not vocally supported President Bush's invasion in 2003, continued to defend the war in principle, and opposed adopting a timetable for withdrawal.

It’s fair to say that Lamont’s challenge wouldn’t have happened without Iraq, but Iraq was the spark that lit years of growing disaffection with Lieberman: for his arrogance, his indifference to his local constituents, and above all for his eagerness to trash Democrats and serve the interests of George W. Bush, a man most Democrats believe is the most profoundly destructive and dishonorable President of our lives. Year after year, we saw Lieberman parroting Republican talking points, providing cover for this administration’s worst actions: its dismantling of civil liberties, its antidemocratic secrecy, even, shockingly, its legitimization of torture.

Does Weisberg disagree with our judgment about Bush? Or does he believe Democrats should swallow their convictions about issues this important?

We saw Lieberman savage Clinton during the impeachment hearings, and you know what? That’s OK with me. Clinton had it coming. But did we ever see Lieberman criticizing Bush and Rove for their filthy dirty tricks? Did we ever see Lieberman criticizing them for outing Valerie Plame? You’ll search the Web in vain for those clips. But here’s what you will find: three weeks before the 2004 election, here’s Lieberman down in Florida talking about just how great Bush is for Israel, and how Kerry can’t quite be trusted: (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/10/14/141645.shtml).

Republicans are the party of the powerful: Democrats ought to be the party defending the interests of ordinary people. But here is Joe Lieberman in 1993 parroting the industry talking points on health care reform. Here, more recently, is Joe Lieberman voting for cloture on the disgraceful bankruptcy bill: a bill that will, mark my words, ruin millions of American families in the coming years. Here is Joe Lieberman collecting millions, year after year, from insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

In the Enron era, Democrats should have been able to look back and say: we tried to protect individual investors from the criminal ravages of unrestrained capitalism. But when we look back, who will we find savaging Arthur Levitt and the SEC when they attempted to halt some of the era’s most dishonest financial manipulations? Joe Lieberman, who else? Highly regarded, my rear end.

Weisberg writes:

This is a signal event that will have a huge and lasting negative impact on the Democratic Party. The result suggests that instead of capitalizing on the massive failures of the Bush administration, Democrats are poised to re-enact a version of the Vietnam-era drama that helped them lose five out six presidential elections between 1968 and the end of the Cold War.

Ned Lamont, a preppy political novice from Greenwich, got the idea to run last year when something he read in the Wall Street Journal made him gag on his breakfast. It was a hopeful analysis of Iraq by Lieberman.

It might’ve been nice to quote that analysis, i.e., “There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before,” or better yet to link to it ( http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007611). Lieberman makes a few credible points, but by and large, he’s been proven wrong on almost every point. But, as usual, anti-war folks get pilloried for being correct too soon: correct before enough people have died, correct before the “respectable” people have noticed what’s really going on.

Weisberg continues:

[Lamont’s] campaign was made plausible by Web-based "Net roots" activists who cared principally about the war in Iraq and badgered Lieberman mercilessly about his support for it.

It’s difficult for me to believe Weisberg has actually read the netroots, nor that he’s aware of the immense non-virtual activity that went on within Connecticut to organize the Lamont campaign. Onward, though:

Lieberman's opponents are not entirely wrong about the war. The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war. Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner we find a way to withdraw, the better for us and for the Iraqis. The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.

We have three separate issues. First, Weisberg apparently agrees that Lamont and his supporters are 100% right, or nearly 100% right on the war. (Well, he says they “are not entirely wrong,” which is a stunning opening to the paragraph that follows.) It’s hardly worth the electrons to comment on this. Weisberg then observes that some of us see Iraq “purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11.” Why would anyone possibly view it that way? Why would anyone possibly think Bush and Rove could cynically politicize the war on terror? Has Jacob Weisberg ever heard of Max Cleland? Sheesh: you gotta be kiddin’ me!

Second, however, Weisberg goes on to say that many of the anti-Lieberman insurgents “appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously.” With not even a nod to the disastrous course Bush has taken in fighting it: a course that has been colossally counterproductive (note, most recently, even the Christian community in Lebanon brought to the point of saying nice things about Hezbollah). With nary a nod to the clear and well-thought-out alternatives proposed by folks like Wesley Clark, Rand Beers, et al.

But then we come to the real nub of Weisberg’s point: the ‘60s are repeating themselves...

Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue. In turning viciously on stalwarts of the Cold War era like Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, anti-war insurgents called into question the Democratic Party's underlying commitment to challenging Communist expansion. The party's Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense—and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism—helped push a lot of Americans who didn't much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.

An earlier commenter made the point that it was race which, more than anything else, drove people to Richard Nixon. Also, even Weisberg’s gotta know that history doesn’t repeat itself quite that neatly, and if you think it is, maybe you gotta dig a little deeper. (Though I much confess GWB looks a bit too much like Kaiser Wilhelm II for my tastes.)

But, more importantly, Weisberg’s implicitly saying one of both of two things: Vietnam war opponents should have stifled their principles, and allowed more people to die in a war that was a “terrible mistake,” and/or the netroots are nothing more than clones of ‘60s hippies who’ve learned nothing.

The first notion is, frankly, immoral. The second is -- yet again -- deliberately ignorant of the extensive conversations that have in fact taken place amongst the netroots, and their fundamental demographic, political, and intellectual differences from the ‘60s counterculture and anti-war movement. U.S. military veteran Kos is not Jerry Rubin, for chrissakes: please stop confusing the Ward Churchills of the world with mainstream netroots opinion:

In a similar way, the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad. Nixon had the gift of hippie demonstrators and fellow-traveling bluebloods like Ned's great uncle Corliss Lamont as antagonists. Today's Republicans face an anti-war movement with a different tone and style, including an electronic counterculture of enraged bloggers and callow entrepreneurs like Ned himself. Yet the underlying political dynamic is not altogether different.

“Not altogether different.” What a weasely way of saying “exactly the same,” when you know -- or ought to know -- perfectly well that it ain’t so!