All Talk, No Walk

Another "Slow Joe" speaks (to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington yesterday morning):

"Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush."

Those words were part of a speech that traced Mr. Lieberman's own position on the war in the tradition of not only the great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, but also the interventionism of President Clinton and his vice president, Albert Gore, a man who has played to the net roots base that tried and failed to unseat Mr. Lieberman in 2006.

Mr. Lieberman was particularly critical of his 22 Democratic colleagues in the Senate who voted against the senator's resolution to label Iran's revolutionary guard corps and elite Quds Force a foreign terrorist entity. He accused liberal Web logs of peddling a "conspiracy theory," namely that the legislation was a back door authorization for war. Also, without naming names, he said some of his colleagues who had voted against it said they agreed with its substance, but told the senator, "We don't trust Bush. He'll use this resolution as an excuse for war against Iran."

Mr. Lieberman concluded, "There is something profoundly wrong-something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush Administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops." He added, "There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base — even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime."

Parenthetically, Clinton was no "interventionist"; he bombed Serbia back to the Stone Age as a phony, trumped-up attempt to de-peckerize his "legacy," not out of any real or even purported US national security concerns.

Indeed, a strong case can be made that there weren't any "great Democrat presidents of the twentieth century," particularly in this context. Wilson didn't keep us out of World War I; Roosevelt saw World War II coming but didn't act pre-emptively, then got suckered by Stalin, sewing the seeds of the Cold War; Truman refused to win in Korea; Kennedy blundered into the Cuban Missile Crisis by chickening out at the Bay of Pigs; Johnson insisted upon losing in Vietnam. And don't get me started on Mr. Peanut.

It isn't very reassuring that THAT is the "tradition" to which Joe Lieberman harkens. How much worse the contrast to today's Traitorcratic Party that it makes the "independent Democrat" senator look like a Churchillian voice in the wilderness.

And one who will not merit a "profile in courage" award that doesn't come out of a box of corn flakes until he does the one thing that will give meaning to this sandbox dissidence: cross the aisle. Switch parties. Take the Senate out of Dirty Harry's filthy, quisling hands and give it back to the GOP, which, for all its undeniable faults, has shown sufficient mettle on the war this year that we can be confident its members will not be stampeded into cutting & running from the Middle East and guaranteeing strategic disaster.

Time to put away the sizzle and get out the steak, Slow Joe. Otherwise you're just an accessory to that which you condemn, mumbling on that back bench.