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Kissyface
- the unprincipled troll
Everybody
hates a backstabber
Glenn Greenwald has already
mentioned today's column from David Brooks, resident squishy
intellectual conservative at the New York Times. It is a classic of the
"in support of the indefensible"
genre, and its subject is the goodness of Joe Lieberman, the senator
from Connecticut who will not
seek reelection in 2012. As a defense of Joe, though, it suffers from
the fact that it didn't even appear
to convince Brooks himself.
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, because in his
penultimate paragraph, he writes:
It would be nice if voters made
room for a few independents like this. There have been times, like
during the health care debate, when I found Lieberman’s independence
befuddling and detached from
any evident intellectual moorings. But, in general, he has shown a
courageous independence of mind.
In other words:
1. I acknowledge that actual real-life voters don't care for
Lieberman's style of "independence."
2. Lieberman's behavior during the time directly contradicts the point
I am trying to make.
3. But whatever, my point still stands.
I'm just glad the son of a bitch is leaving,
but he can't leave fast enough for me.