McJoan points out that Rubber Stamp McCain is a hypocrite on Feingold’s Censure resolution. But what about the Lieberman? Well aside from supporting right-wing nutcases on hospitals being able denying contraception to rape victims (his excuse is that “In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital), he’s also against Feingold’s censure resolution.
Unfortunately, the link to Firedoglake isn’t working right now, because they’re down. But I’ll try to update once I can get the link to work.
And one more note on this. What Lieberman said today about a short drive to a hospital is immensely cruel. I’m a guy, so I probably can’t talk about this with any credibility. But I will try to describe what I think because this is so awful and because hey, I’m not going to cut myself out of the conversation just because other dudes are self-righteous assholes about ‘men’s rights’.
Having a medical procedure done, any medical procedure, is embarrassing, intrusive, and scary, especially in a system as fucked up as ours where doctors don’t really care about you because they are paid to avoid mistakes with paperwork. When you combine with this making the decision to have children or not, and maybe in a bunch of cases dumbfuck boyfriends who either aren’t around or aren’t helpful, the agony for some women is just immense. To talk about hospitals denying legal medical care because commuting is easy in Connecticut is really monstrous. It’s so out of touch, so banal in the evil sense, and so downright elitist and cowardly.
Joe Lieberman will never have to have an abortion. He will never have to fight in a war. He will never be raped. And he will never have to bear the consequences of the choices he makes as a Senator. If nothing else, Ned Lamont has young children, and so the choices he makes are necessarily going to have more compassion and more strength behind them because he actually cares about the world his children will inherit. Lieberman simply doesn’t. As a nice and cowardly man, he just cares about the sensitivities of those surrounding him. And since those who surround him are a mix of corrupt lobbyists and right-wing nutcases, his decisions are awful and morally cruel.
David Sirota is completely right when he says that Lieberman’s campaign manager admitted Lieberman’s out of touch. Lieberman is out of touch. This isn’t a partisan issue, and I don’t actually care that Lieberman goes on Fox News, really. To me, that’s just a symptom of a bankrupt, spiritually dead man who has lost the will to make the right decisions. Lieberman is out of touch like Robert Moses was out of touch. Moses built all the highways of New York City, only Moses never actually knew how to drive a car because he had a chauffeur so he never realized what a traffic jam was. It was just extra time for him to work. He didn’t realize the hell his system put New Yorkers through.
As a former Connecticut resident and a current resident of a neighborhood chopped up and made far less functional by Robert Moses, this resonates with me.
Lieberman, when he first ran against Lowell Weicker, didn’t seem so bad. He was a fresh face, and Weicker seemed not to be taking his job so seriously anymore. So I voted for him. And for a while he was a pretty decent Senator (and Weicker went on to become an independent and a pretty darn good governor). I didn’t even know that he was an observant Jew until he jumped on the whole shame-on-Clinton bandwagon and became a moral scold. Running on religion doesn’t play well in Connecticut; it’s considered tacky to talk about things like that.
And then, suddenly, he became Holy Joe and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about religion and morality, and he started kissing up big time to the Republicans — literally, in the case of Bush and his infamous floor-of-the-Senate smooch at a State of the Union address.
But this whole comment that it’s not that big of a deal to drive to another hospital to get EC because Connecticut’s a small state really, really pisses me off. Sure, Joe — you get your shattered body and mind together to call the police and get to a hospital after being raped, only to find the hospital won’t give you EC, so sorry, better go try Manchester Memorial or Hartford Hospital because we won’t give you that here, but I can’t tell you if you’ll be spending all night on the road because I don’t know what the policy is where you’re going. Hell, you might try going to Rhode Island or New York, since they’re only a short drive too (don’t bother with Massachusetts; who knows what Mitt Romney’s been up to).
If his vote against cloture on Alito wasn’t enough, it this enough to dump him, NARAL?
Incidentally, Republican Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut is sponsoring and/or supporting various bills that would ensure that women were allowed to get their prescribed medications without interference from religious pharmacists and to receive as a matter of right emergency contraception when taken to a hospital after being raped. What the fuck is wrong with Lieberman that he can’t get it like Shays can?
Just join the GOP, Joe. You know you want to.
Glad to see you’ve jumped on the anti-NARAL bandwagon. One question. Aside from what Jane Hamsher says, how do we know NARAL supports Lieberman? The Chaffee thing, yes. That was wrong. But I’ve not seen anything about them endorsing Lieberman. We need to call these organizations to the carpet for things they really do, not things someone tells us they do.
They have him listed as having a score of 75 on his voting record for 2005, which is higher than Lincoln Chaffee’s 65, and they still support him.
Good link, didn’t see that. But I think my point still stands. NARAL blissfully announced their stupid endorsement of Chafee for re-election. Unless I’ve missed them doing the same for Lieberman, then I don’t get how we’re supposed to be mad about them reporting on how he voted last year. Maybe I just don’t understand how this works. Dunno.
Chaffee was an issue because NARAL endorsed him over a pro-choice Democratic challenger in his campaign for re-election in 2004. Lieberman wasn’t an issue at the time, but since he now has a pro-choice Democratic primary challenger (though no serious Republican opposition as yet), it’s useful to keep the pressure on NARAL to dump him.
I guess that’s where I’m confused about this whole thing. I thought no one was supported by a group officially if they haven’t been endorsed. So it seems like the point would be to encourage NARAL and Planned Parenthood to either endorse whoever is really pro-choice, or not endorse at all.
I’m not sure I am making sense, but it seems like there’s no dumping to be done if they’re not supporting someone. Ugh. I’m going to stop now, I’m sure the point of this post wasn’t Politics 101.
Zuzu, I always hated Lieberman and believed he was a Republican plant to take out that Javitz-Liberal-Northeastern-Republican thorn in thier side Lowell Weicker.
thanks, zuzu for the great post. as for massachusetts, the state legislature passed the bill to make EC available over the counter, and went on to override romney’s veto.
we’re still blue!
Why censure? Why is the NSA thing not grounds for impeachment? Or is it just that Feingold doesn’t think impeachment will have enough support, and censuring might succeed?
Gordon K,
Feingold said censure is the “first step,” but I’m pretty sure he just thinks impeachment wouldn’t get enough support. Though, I’m not sure I agree. I think people can shrug off censure as fluff, or a dsitraction, which you’re less likely to see with impeachment.
Thagmano: yeah … “censure” as a first step is, I think, a dumb idea. Once you’ve said, “bad dog, don’t do it again”, that’s kind of it; you’ve used up all of your political capital doing that, so impeachment is not really an option.
Thagmano: yeah … “censure” as a first step is, I think, a dumb idea. Once you’ve said, “bad dog, don’t do it again”, that’s kind of it; you’ve used up all of your political capital doing that, so impeachment is not really an option.
What sickens me most about Leiberman is he exudes the kind of distance and inhumanity that seem to creep onto many long time politicians. He also seems to represent a whole strata of society, that although they wouldn’t want to call themselves republican, seem to secretly embrace certain portions of republican ideology.
Like himself there exists a class of people, comfortable financially, fearful of change and who possess many shades of republican but who, for whatever reason just won’t jump ship and join the other side.
So like oozing, rotting, useless hunks of inedible meat, they nourish no one on the leaky, crowded democratic life raft, so seemingly adrift at sea. Their presence only gathers flies, sharks and weighs the raft down, further threatening its sinking..
I should also point out that Lieberman grew up and still makes his home in or near New Haven, which is lousy with hospitals, Yale-New Haven being the biggest. He apparently doesn’t spend much time in the eastern part of the state, where the hospitals are few and far between.