Sen. Joe Lieberman has cracked under five years of alienation and pressure. After being turned aside by the Democratic party, feeling alone with no alternatives, he has cracked.
So I am responding to this article about the Ft. Hood shooting (which the FBI has said is not a terrorist incident), but also to his statements about supporting a filibuster against health care reform. CT is a fairly liberal state and all five representatives voted yea on HR 3962. So why would Lieberman not only vote against the bill (which would reduce its margin of victory), but also threaten not to impose cloture? What does he have to gain?
My detached sense (no longer in the DC world) is that he is finished with politics and wants to throw his weight around. I was not upset when he decided to support McCain, as that did not affect his legislative duties to the party. But when he not only doesn't support the party platform, but actively undermines it I just can't see how he can retain his HS chairmanship.
The Ft. Hood thing is just weird. It was a guy that cracked. Case closed. Is it really worth the time of the US Senate to understand why outliers happen?
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
13 years ago
19 comments:
What do you call a man who plans an attack against his fellows and executes it while shouting, "Allahu Akbar" if not a terrorist?
I don't think you can call Lieberman "cracked" because he disagrees with you on issues you think are crucial. He's been around for a while and it's safe to say he knows his constituency. It's also possible he has principles.
Btw, Zev, do you ever disagree with the accepted left wing position?
I certainly don't know Lieberman's future plans but his behavior seems rationally directed towards winning re-election in 2012. He can't assume that he'll win the Democratic nomination. Among others, the all important demographic of pseudo-intellectual twits who consider their grandmothers to be ignorant bigots is probably set against him. If he's going to win without the Democratic nomination he'll need to neuter the GOP nominee again. He'll have to move right on some high-profile issues in order to do that.
I don't know how much dissent the Senate Democratic caucus will tolerate from its members, but you don't either and Lieberman plausibly does. For one thing, stripping him of his chair might look really bad for a majority leader in a tough re-election contest.
I am somewhat befuddled at your implication that legislators must accept everything executive branch spokesmen say as the complete and exclusive truth without any further investigation. You don't really believe that.
"Is it really worth the time of the US Senate to understand why outliers happen?" Now you're just being stupid. Yes, it is.outlier individuals and events can cause great harm to our republic. A more appropriate question is should the government strive to prevent harms so improbable that the preventative costs outweigh the expected harm. But you haven't remotely established that the costs of special notice given to military personnel who engage in "anti-American propaganda" or special measures taken for military personnel who try to contact suspected al-qaeda figures outweighs the likely harm, have you?
In general, Zev, I think you too often allow your partisan blinders to impair your critical thinking skills. Your online record, I think, suggests a great deal of credulity when it comes to criticisms and attacks on your ideological opponents on the right. I suspect your determination that Lieberman has "cracked" comes from a similar inability or unwillingness to credit members of the opposing camp.
Best Regards,
Shmuli
With paragraph spacing
I certainly don't know Lieberman's future plans but his behavior seems rationally directed towards winning re-election in 2012. He can't assume that he'll win the Democratic nomination. Among others, the all important demographic of pseudo-intellectual twits who consider their grandmothers to be ignorant bigots is probably set against him. If he's going to win without the Democratic nomination he'll need to neuter the GOP nominee again. He'll have to move right on some high-profile issues in order to do that.
I don't know how much dissent the Senate Democratic caucus will tolerate from its members, but you don't either and Lieberman plausibly does. For one thing, stripping him of his chair might look really bad for a majority leader in a tough re-election contest.
I am somewhat befuddled at your implication that legislators must accept everything executive branch spokesmen say as the complete and exclusive truth without any further investigation. You don't really believe that.
"Is it really worth the time of the US Senate to understand why outliers happen?" Now you're just being stupid. Yes, it is.outlier individuals and events can cause great harm to our republic. A more appropriate question is should the government strive to prevent harms so improbable that the preventative costs outweigh the expected harm. But you haven't remotely established that the costs of special notice given to military personnel who engage in "anti-American propaganda" or special measures taken for military personnel who try to contact suspected al-qaeda figures outweighs the likely harm, have you?
In general, Zev, I think you too often allow your partisan blinders to impair your critical thinking skills. Your online record, I think, suggests a great deal of credulity when it comes to criticisms and attacks on your ideological opponents on the right. I suspect your determination that Lieberman has "cracked" comes from a similar inability or unwillingness to credit members of the opposing camp.
Best Regards,
Shmuli
shmuli,
one more time, with feeling.
but seriously, i side with you on this one, at least from paragraph 3 and on.
miriam
Even Sen. Lieberman, in the article to which Zev linked, qualified his statement about whether the Ft. Hood shooting was an act of terrorism. We can quibble about what "terrorism" means, but it seems to me that there's a difference between attacks like 9-11 and Madrid and, say, the assassination of RFK. Is Major Hasan's shooting more like the former or the latter? I don't think that Hasan was just "a guy that cracked"—he sounds like a disgruntled oddball loner who thought about and planned the shooting for some time—but he sounds like he has more in common with George Sodini and George Hennard than Osama bin Laden. Still, I'd like to think that the Army is doing something to keep nutcases out, not just terrorists. That seems worth an inquiry.
Sam
Also, I think it's a little weird that you use the word "cracked" with both Major Hasan and Sen. Lieberman.
Has it occurred to you that Lieberman might be enjoying his national notoriety as a maverick (ex-)Democrat and playing to audiences beyond CT voters (who probably don't have much of a choice)?
Sam
the way zev phrases it made me think he is evoking your average amercian joe oddbal who has a bad day/month/life, "cracks," and kills his wife/kids/coworkers. It seems like this is not that, because it has an overtly political element. A la John Salvi, say. I agree that it is not Osama bin Laden, and that to focus on whether or not it is "terrorism" misses the point. The point is whether it has and should have political meaning, and if so what it means.
that was me
-miriam
Glad I could spark some heated debate.
I am not an Americanist, but my sense is that Lieberman has tacked right on social issues, deviating from his prior voting record. Shmuli, maybe it is strategic, but I my sense is that Ned Lamont was a one time thing. Lieberman had much more trouble dealing with the D challenger in '06 than the R one, which indicates to me that he ought to protect his left flank rather than his right one. I might be wrong about Lieberman's recent voting record, but at least Gail Collins seems to echo my perception. In other countries belonging to a political party requires one to vote in a certain direction. That is not really true in the U.S., but parties might still find it useful to employ carrots and sticks to keep their members in line.
If you want to regard politicians as dispassionate ration actors maximizing their electability, then the efficacy of Lieberman's strategy will be bared out in 2012. I am not convinced that representation works that way. I can see how Lieberman can be said to have let down the people who voted for him.
Re: PP3, I don't see how I argue that one, even in the same party as the sitting president, may not question him.
On the potential of Senate hearings, I think America ought to be kept safe. Generally that is the prerogative of law enforcement. If it is a systemic problem regarding the legal powers afforded to law enforcement to do their job then the legislature might want to get involved. I do not see that there is any indication of this in the Ft. Hood case.
Just a final plea to keep it civil. My liberal disposition is not really of consequence nor what I think of my dear grandmother. I post this stuff to expose my ideas to scrutiny, not my person.
To add, I there might actually be reason to hold Senate hearings about the military firing process for medical personnel. In that case it is not "terrorism" which is of concern, but how the Army deals with obviously disturbed personnel.
So I really don't want to get into the whole "what is terrorism" question, because there is just way too much literature to peruse and I don't have time to do so. My naive view is that terrorism is a crime meant to generate fear with the hope of systematically causing political unrest. All violent crimes cause fear, but they are not all aimed to destabilize government. And one obviously disturbed fellow yelling "Allahu akbar!" is not a systematic crime.
The nice thing about your definition of terrorism is that if that is true then there have been no Jewish terrorists since 1948.
Zev, I could not include you in the aforementioned demographic. You are not remotely a "twit". Why, I could even see you supporting Lieberman in certain circumstances.
I was only speculating from ignorance about Lieberman's political calculations. I am not suggesting this speculation as being probably accurate. I could sit and offer many other possible motivations for him as well. My point was to suggest that you were off base in concluding he was acting irrationally. As Yehuda suggested, his preferences here could also be entirely policy based.
You seem to imply that once the FBI spokesman declared this not a terrorist incident, it is crazy and/or inappropriate for a legislator to suggest otherwise.
There has been suggestion that pc concerns led to greater tolerance of this fellow that if he were from less politically protected groups. This would be a systemic problem.
As you know, Lieberman got more votes from Republicans than Democrats, so I'm not sure you could say he's letting down his voters in this case.
Yehuda, have there been no Jews who have been leftist terrorists since 1948?
Shmuli
"To add, I there might actually be reason to hold Senate hearings about the military firing process for medical personnel. "
way too localized. the thing congress should be looking into is how the military makes people (yes, usually poor people) crazy and then denies it, refuses to commit the resources necessary to helping traumatized people, and then pretends those people are just "outliers" who were crazy for some independent reason...
btw, i don't think what happens in the military is usually a "law enforcement" issue. the military is its own world.
miriam
(apologies for the ranty quality of para. 1, but this is something about which i feel strongly.)
In the absence of face-to-face discussions, it's hard for me to tell sometimes when some of you are being sarcastic. Please forgive me if this is a foolish question, but wasn't the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin meant to "cause fear" and "destabilize government"? I mean, Yigal Amir could hardly be called a leftist. For that matter, what about the JDL? (I am not saying that there are no leftist terrorists, but I'll leave you to find some examples.)
I was struck by the NPR article about his time at Walter Reed, where Major Hasan's superiors wondered if he was "psychotic." For heaven's sake, they should be able to tell! They're psychiatrists! It's not hard to get discharged from the military or government work (being an army doctor in some sense is in both worlds, although you are subject to military justice) if you're gay, if you use drugs, ... so what were they doing hanging on to Hasan?
I wasn't trying to suggest that Hasan's murderous rampage was not a terrorist act, just that there's a terrorist spectrum, say, and this seems more like the assassination of RFK than 9-11. I was just responding to Yehuda's "What do you call ... if not a terrorist." It seems more complicated in my mind because Hasan acted alone (as far as we know) and because many of his coworkers believed that he was crazy. Maybe I'm being naive.
I have nothing of substance to add to this argument about Senator Lieberman, except that he's always been on the right on social issues, contra Zev. Fun fact: he's the one responsible for pressuring the music industry into putting "explicit lyrics" stickers on CDs, along with Tipper Gore and Lynne Cheney. By the way, those came out of highly publicized hearings in the Senate. If they had enough time to grandstand about Prince and Black Sabbath (doesn't that sound quaint today?), maybe they have some time to talk about the Army.
Sam
I was trying to point out that defining terror in such a way as to minimize certain aspects of attacks carried out by Muslims, has the result of minimizing attacks carried out by Jews as well. Sam, your statement exemplified this perfectly: Yigal Amir is a terrorist, according to Zev's definition, but Baruch Goldstein or Teitel would not be.
I myself adopt the English language definition of "terrorism," according to which attacks aimed at inspiring fear and terror in the population are terrorists acts and people carrying them out are terrorists. It is generally desirable to add that terrorists are non-State actors.
That said, there is, of course, an important difference between organized terror and acts carried out by lone-nutcases. The English language is fortunately broad enough to be able to describe the difference without too much complication.
I forgot to add: according to my definition, and the definition I maintain is inherent in the word "terrorist," Yigal Amir was not a terrorist, but a political assassin. Goldstein and Teitel are, however, terrorists. I find this way of speaking to be much more intuitive.
I'm not sure why it's desirable to exclude "State actors" from a definition of terrorism: for example, isn't Hamas a state actor? I mean, if we're talking about English words, the term "terrorism" was first used to describe the Reign of Terror ... It seems like a useful paradigm to me to explain, say, what's going on in India (with both the state and non-state actors engaging in "terrorist" acts). Perhaps you want to avoid the common leftist trope about Israeli "state terrorism"; I can't read your mind.
Is anyone here trying to "minimize certain aspects of attacks carried out by Muslims"? What could you possibly mean by that? Terrorism has a *statutory* definition in the USA (actually it probably has many different ones) and presumably that's what Zev's original FBI spokesperson was talking about. You're right, though: there is an important distinction between organized terrorist acts and acts carried out by "lone-nutcases" ... which, in my mind, is why it is not helpful to describe Maj. Hasan's rampage as the worst attack on US soil since 9-11. There are so many things that were unusual about it: that Hasan was an army physician; that Hasan, according to reports from other doctors, may have been psychotic; that Hasan planned the attack, as far as I know, entirely on his own ...
Sam
Gosh, I really need to keep this blog on my live feed.
Zev, you've drank the cool aid on your Ft. Hood comment.
Hope everyone is doing well.
Yossi
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