Joe Lieberman: Mass murderer, dullard
I will admit to some evil pleasure at watching the left erupt over Joe Lieberman’s refusal to back health care reform. It really is kind of funny to see how much the netleft’s purity test in ’06 has come back to harm them: Not only might it end up costing them a seat in the Senate if Lieberman is pushed so far he starts caucusing with the GOP, it also might end up costing them health care reform. Good job, Markos!
The attacks just keep getting better. I thought no one would be able to top Ezra Klein, who essentially called Joe Lieberman a mass murderer of the banal sort, a kind of Eichmann of the Senate.* But then bam, there’s Jonathan Chait suggesting that Lieberman doesn’t want to support health care reform because, well, he’s just not that smart. After all, we know that all the big brains are for universal health care coverage!
Reihan Salam has pretty definitive takedowns of both charges over at his excellent NRO blog, The Agenda. On the count of saving lives, Reihan notes
If we really did argue the issue in this terrain of number of lives saved, I have to say — I’m pretty confident that we could do much better than $900 billion for 150,000 lives, particularly if we are entirely indifferent to the impact on total employment, economic growth, and personal freedom.
Indeed. And, as to Lieberman’s intellectual capacities, Reihan muses thusly:
My sense is that Lieberman is not the only prominent elected Democrat with a law degree from an elite institution who has been given tremendous credit for his intellect yet who speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. The Democrat I have in mind has explicitly said that he’d prefer a single-payer model of reform, yet he has dedicated his prestige and political capital to a reform model that, as a number of serious policy thinkers, will prove almost impossible to administer. Like Lieberman, this Democrat has an appealingly cerebral personal style, which involves rejecting false dichotomies and seeking common ground between right and left. His clumsiness in office and frequent political miscalculations have never been treated as signs of a lack of intelligence, however. The parallels go on and on.
I assume there’s plenty of overlap between our readerships, but it goes without saying that you should be reading Reihan as often as you can get your grubby little mitts on his work. A good place to start is with Grand New Party, he and Ross Douthat’s look toward the future of the Republican Party. It’s characteristically smart and well-written.
*Ezra, of course, would dispute this characterization of his words, but when he writes “At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score” it’s hard to interpret his thoughts too many other ways.