by Matt Taibbi
Walking the peaceful streets of Anytown, you’d never guess this—although at night the family purges unconscious guilt by watching morality plays like The O.C. and Desperate Housewives, in which Middle America ritualistically confesses to a sizzling sex life it’s never come close to having. Our defining characteristic is that despite a creeping fear, we know ourselves very poorly and have willfully turned a blind eye to the world outside our easy, cocoonlike consumer lives.
In the same way, our soldiers on the FOB may be forgiven for not understanding the discontent over the wall, because the “Iraq” of their experience is not much different from the cable-ready communities, with the Burger King just down the street, that many of them came from in the first place.
Life is good and happy down the rabbit hole, but outside it something is going terribly wrong. What’s horrifying about Iraq is that none of our people, not even the ones running things, seem to understand why that might be. It’s a terrible thing to be blind. Terrible—and frightening.
Not long after I got home, I got an e-mail from Wilkerson in the 158th, the good-luck Oklahoma boys: hey man, how ya doin? we are doin good. we got hit the other day and it wasnt good at all. i cant give you details or anything but just know all our boys are good . . . but im gonna go get for now, so you be good and drink a beer for me. Hahaha later steve-o
The gang that never gets hit had been on its way home to Baghdad from Baqubah on the evening of June 5 when the third truck in the convoy was rocked by an explosion. Spicer and Wilkerson, in the second truck, accelerated through the cloud and made it to safety. But Specialist Issac Lawson, a Californian I hadn’t met in my time with the squad, was hit badly. He died on arrival after an airlift to a nearby field hospital.
In war good luck always runs out. The only thing no one runs out of is more people. And when one of the sides is America, not even the money is exhaustible. The thing just keeps spinning, spitting out more bodies, and you find yourself ashamed of being glad it isn’t someone you know.
Bush’s Favorite Democrat
In Connecticut’s Democratic primary, Joe Lieberman
claims he’s facing a leftist “jihad,” but there are two
words the senator can’t duck: “Iraq” and “war”
August 10, 2006
Early Sunday afternoon, Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church, New Haven, Connecticut. A hot summer day with an all-black congregation, a big hall in a tough neighborhood packed full to the last pew, with the faithful cooling themselves with old-fashioned handheld fans. Senator Joe Lieberman, a pale animal with a balloon head, stands at the podium and smiles, his gnomish Wallace Shawn mini-fingers piously clasped before him.
As an orator, Lieberman is a pro’s pro. No matter what the crowd, his rap always has the feel of a barroom Casanova’s metronome come-on. He talks and talks, and five minutes later you can’t figure out how his hand got that far up your skirt. He is especially brilliant in this particular environment, an absolute master of the “my heart is as black as yours” honkie-in-church act. He swoops in, tells a story about meeting Dr. King back in the day, shakes his head solemnly at the scourge of racism, and then coasts to a Scripture-packed dismount. Clear throat; assume sonorous, preacherly intone; dream aloud of a better day ahead, a day when . . .
“When the mountains will be made low, when the valleys will be raised up, when the rough road will be made smooth and the crooked path will be made straight,” he says. “Because on that day, with God’s help, the earth truly will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”
Jesus, I think. This guy’s good. He pauses, smiling, for applause. Then: “Thank you! Enjoy lunch!”
And he’s outta there. The whole thing takes about eight minutes. You can keep your political speeches pretty short in the year 2006 if you don’t once mention the words “war” or “Iraq.” Next stop: firemen in Fairfield. I’m still gathering my shit in the church foyer when I see his caravan zooming past the entrance, back toward the highway.
The scene says everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. It spends its weekdays sucking off the Pentagon and Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, and on the weekends it comes out and spends five minutes getting teary-eyed for the “I have a dream” speech and thinks you owe it your vote because of it. Some party members agree, but quite a few don’t, which is why Joe Lieberman—the hawkish onetime vice presidential candidate who has made himself the most visible symbol of the “new” Democrats—is facing a surprising primary challenge on August 8. Like Lieberman himself, the “I was there in the sixties” act is finally getting old.
“I hate the sixties, and I’m tired of hearing about it—what have you done for me lately?” says Regina Meade, one of the churchgoers. She shakes her head. “I lost a cousin in the war. Twenty-nine years old. What about that? What about that?”
Billed as a preview to the midterm elections later this fall, with implications for the ’08 presidential race, the Democratic primary for the Senate in Connecticut is a hot little turd attracting, for the first time since November ’04, the exiled flies of national campaign journalism. They are here in Connecticut now, searching angrily for good coffee and road maps in precious little towns like Wallingford, Fairfield, and Danbury, where Lieberman is currently even in the polls with an antiwar challenger in the person of a wide-eyed political rookie named Ned Lamont.
If you believe the propaganda emanating from Lieberman and his coterie of whore-cronies in the Democratic Leadership Council, Lamont is a dangerous, pillar-crushing revolutionary, a preppy, tanned mixture of Lenin and the Ayatollah. The Democrat insiders’ strategy vis-à-vis Lamont is very similar to the one used to dispose of Howard Dean a few years back, only it’s even more savage this time around. They have chosen to go after Lamont’s supporters in the blogosphere, deriding the likes of “Daily Kos” founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and the wackos at MoveOn.org as “liberal fundamentalists” bent on liquidating poor Lieberman for the sake of radical leftist orthodoxy. The DLC started the smear campaign in June with an editorial called “The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism” that used the word “purge” no fewer than eight times, in case you missed the KGB motif the first seven times.
Since then, a spate of similar editorials has appeared in the national media, with anyone and everyone jumping on the theme of blood-hungry blogger leftists scheming to take over the world via the Lamont campaign—from New York Times elitist fuckhead David Brooks (“The Liberal Inquisition”) to Jonathan Chait at the Los Angeles Times (“Purely Foolish Democrats”) to those always-predictable bards of conventional wisdom at Newsweek (“The War’s Left Front”). The whole campaign was a classic bit of bait and switch. Rather than face up to its own record on the war, the party tried to defend its own by making the race into a referendum on “leftist” Internet pests, some with suspiciously foreign-sounding names.
And just like three summers ago, when the media cheerfully regurgitated party-concocted code words like “angry,” “shrill,” “testy,” and “strident” when discussing the doomed Howard Dean, reporters this time around made sure to repeat the same terrorist/communist–themed code words in their campaign coverage, with nearly every major media outlet including some combination of the words “purge” or “fundamentalist” in their Lamont stories. New York magazine went so far as to call Lamont’s Net-roots supporters the “Blogitburo,” and Lieberman himself, in an interview, derided his opponents’ supporters as being on a “jihad.”
This witch-hunting horseshit was preposterous enough, when the DLC and its ilk somehow succeeded in painting a tepid, pro-business centrist from the Hamptons like Dean as the second coming of Karl Marx. But that was nothing compared to the stretch they’re making in playing the red-baiting game with Lamont, a Richie Rich Harvard capitalist from the socioeconomic Olympus of Greenwich whose expensively wavy haircut and crisp, supernaturally clean chinos would bring a
tear to the eye of the mannequin in the Pebble Beach Pro Shop.
The only thing radical about Lamont is his opposition to the Iraq War policies of George Bush and Lieberman, and in this vague “radicalism” he is joined by upwards of 91 percent of all Democrats, according to recent polls; otherwise, he is as vanilla and unthreatening as a politician could possibly be, the human incarnation of the white line in the middle of the road. Lamont’s non-Iraq politics are not much more than a cautious presentation of already-tried mainstream party ideas, like permitting the uninsured to buy into the congressional health plan, and his stump humor is the gentlest kind of aw-shucks Americana—when he gets applause or cheers from the back of the room, he calls out, “Thanks, Mom!”
When I sat down and talked with Lamont on a park bench after an appearance in Wallingford, he was plainly horrified when I compared the attacks against him to the campaign against Dean. “I hadn’t thought about that,” he said, adding quickly, “What you have to remember is that I’m a business guy from central Connecticut.”
He talked about the assault from the party regulars: “Well, I’ve got grassroots support that is perceived as a threat to the established order,” he said. Then he scratched his head. “But it’s weird. It’s like there’s a signal sent down from somewhere. The other day I was with this reporter from the New York Observer, and he was reading down a list of talking points: Why is it that bipartisanship can’t exist in the party? Are you a pacifist? And so on. And I was like, ‘Man, where is this coming from?’”
Of course it’s fairly obvious where it’s coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits “party insiders” steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters.
The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power.
This defeatist nonsense is sold to the public in the form of beady-eyed party hacks talking to one another in the opinion pages of national media conglomerates, where, after much verbose and solemn discussion, the earnest and idealistic candidate the public actually likes is dismissed on the grounds that “he can’t win.” In his place is trotted out the guy the party honchos insist to us is the real “winner”—some balding, bent little bureaucrat who has grown prematurely elderly before our very eyes over the course of ten or twenty years of sad, compromise-filled service in the House or the Senate.
This “winner” is then given a lavish parade and sent out there on the trail, and we hold our noses as he campaigns in our name on a platform of Jesus, the B-2 bomber, and the death penalty for eleven-year-olds, consoling ourselves that he at least isn’t in favor of repealing the Voting Rights Act. (Or is he? We have to check.) Then he loses to the Republicans anyway and we start all over again—beginning with the next primary election, when we are again told that the antiwar candidate “can’t win” and that the smart bet is the corporate hunchback still wearing two black eyes from the last race.
No one has played the role of that “winner” more enthusiastically, or more often, than Joe Lieberman. He is everything a Washington insider loves in a politician. He is pompous, pious, and available. Routinely one of the very top recipients of campaign donations from the insurance, pharmaceutical, and finance sectors, and a man whose wife, Hadassah, is a pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton, Lieberman has quietly become one of the greatest allies corporate America has in Washington.
For example, Lieberman, who as chairman of the DLC in the mid- to late nineties presided over an organization heavily subsidized by companies such as AIG and Aetna (the latter of which also contributes lavishly to his campaigns), sponsored a bill that limited auto insurance suits by permitting the offering of lower rates to consumers who forfeited their right to sue. He has fought for similar antilawsuit laws for tobacco, for HMOs, for pharmaceutical companies. Victor Schwartz, general counsel for the American Tort Reform Association, once bragged that “if it were not for Lieberman, there would never have been a Biomaterials Access Act”—a 1998 law that protected companies like Dow Chemical and DuPont (also big DLC contributors) from lawsuits filed for the production of defective medical implants. Yes, that’s right: Joe Lieberman fought for the principle of manufacturing faulty fake tits with impunity.
In a move that was perfectly characteristic of everything he stands for, Lieberman in 2001 offered a piece of legislation, S. 1764, that purported to provide incentives to companies that develop medicines to treat the victims of bioterror attacks but, more important, extended the patent life of a wide range of drugs for several years, delaying the introduction of more cost-friendly generic drugs. Shilling for the socialist subsidy of drug companies while masquerading as a Churchillian, tough-on-security Democrat in the war on terror age: that’s Joe Lieber-man, and the modern Democratic Party, in a nutshell.
In the midst of all this whoring for business interests, Lieberman has preposterously marketed himself to the public as a stern guardian of “morality” and “traditional values,” along the way taking some admirably mean-spirited positions. He once supported a bill denying funding to public schools that counseled suicidal teens that it is okay to be gay, a remarkable position for a man whose response to the Enron scandal was to say that “government will never be able to legislate or regulate morals.”
Lieberman also signed the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the notorious organization founded by Lynne Cheney that published a baldly McCarthyite list of “anti-American academics.” In 1997, Lieberman pushed for warning labels on CDs, getting the Senate to take up the issue under the title “Music Violence: How Does It Affect Our Youth?” in the hopes of snagging the votes of a few grandmas by wagging a finger at Marilyn Manson—yes, Lieberman was one of those asshole politicians who tried to pin Columbine on rock music. And rather than denounce Ken Starr for the most egregious misuse of prosecutorial authority since the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lieberman’s response to the Lewinsky scandal was to attack Bill Clinton in one of the lamest “O the children!” acts of all time, saying, “It is hard to ignore the impact of the misconduct the president has admitted to on our children, our culture, and our national character.”
A few years later, faced with a similar political choice, he chose to stand fast by Bush on the issue of Iraq, saying, “We undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.” Apparently the president deserves absolute loyalty only when his mistakes result in teenagers getting their heads shot off.
It was this last position of Lieberman’s that forced the candidacy of Lamont into being. “We’re trying to determine what the right boundary is on a Democrat,” says Lamont spokesman Robert Johnson. “We know what the left boundary is. But what is it on the right? At some point, when a Democrat is sucking up to a president like George Bush, you have to put your foot down. Lieberman does not stop at a ‘center.’ The further right they go, he just follows.”
But, of course, Lieberman’s crowning insult—and perhaps his last fatal mistake as an (ostensible) member of the Democratic Party—was his recent decision to register and run as an independent in case he loses the primary to Lamont. Finally taking his mask off and revealing himself as a baldly self-interested political creature, this final-act version of Lieberman plans on dying hard, forcing liberal voters to kill him twice in the same movie, like Jason in Friday the 13th.
With his hideous fake folksiness, much-celebrated “great sense of humor,” and relentless Beltway hype as just the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet (David Brooks calls him “transparently the most kindhearted and well-intentioned of men”), Joe Lieberman is easy to hate—which makes him easy to hate for the wrong reasons. Sure, he’s an arrogant, condescending prude; sure, he’s
a willing, energetic censor who outrageously poses as an aggrieved champion of “decent people everywhere”; and sure, he reminds you very much of the lecturing, overbearing high school vice principal you once had who ended up getting busted on a kiddie-porn rap ten years after you graduated.
Yet all of that means nothing. What is important to remember about Joe Lieberman is that his individual personality is incidental. Lieberman is just another “winner” to be rolled off the line and served up to Democratic voters by the behind-the-scenes corporate masters bent on controlling both sides of Washington politics, using whatever scare tactics necessary to ensure success. He’s a pawn and a stooge whom they’ve gotten good mileage out of so far because he happens to have a special talent for being just the kind of officious, self-righteous prick you have to be to sell their muddled policies in public—but his time is up now, and not because of him but because of them. People are tired of being told who can and cannot win. As it turns out, they get to decide that for themselves.
The Worst Congress Ever
How our national legislature has become a stable
of thieves and perverts—in five easy steps
November 2, 2006
There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Representative Mark Foley can get himself named cochairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt, and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula—a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.
