Lieberman Derangement Syndrome

After George W. Bush, the radical left blogosphere probably hates no one more than Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Why? Well, Lieberman stayed true to his convictions on foreign policy, backing American power toward the goal of victory in Iraq, standing up for our allies in the Middle East, while the Democratic Party moved further to the left. As the war has continued, the outrage against the Senator's apostasies has grown to unstable proportions.

Firedoglake endlessly demonizes the Connecticut Senator.

But check this entry from Daily Kos, which gets close to qualified mental derangement when talking about Joe, and his recent WSJ essay:

There are another dozen things to mock about Lieberman's column -- deconstructing it would take chapters, not just paragraphs -- but in the end Lieberman's very simplistic and fiction-touting assertions boil down to his own simplistic and fiction-touting notions of foreign policy. Lieberman's true problem (and the one that got him booted from the Democratic Party in his own primary) is that for Lieberman, all foreign policy "seriousness" is dependent on supporting the clusterfuck of Iraq and all related possible clusterfucks in neighboring countries. Not just before the invasion, but during the occupation, during all the "reorganizations" and "surges" and turned corners and imminent successes and plans for goddamned Green Zone theme parks, now and in perpetuity, and now continuing into Iran, and we're not supposed to talk about Pakistan because They Are Our Friends.

If you don't support indefinite action in Iraq, if you don't support the most aggressive of uberhawkish positions in the Middle East, Joe Lieberman will declare you an appeaser, pure and simple. It does not matter what other foreign policy positions you may hold: whether you support action in Afghanistan, or wish to see a non-nuclear North Korea, or what your opinions may be about Sudan or Myanmar or Tibet or Russia or Pakistan or the dozens of other crisis points around the world; for Lieberman, Iraq is all. Support Iraq, or you are not "serious." Support Iraq, or you are an "appeaser."

Here is a man unbalanced by the rage that can only come from a steady stream of human failures. Foreign policy is a simple land, for Joe Lieberman; it steadfastly consists of doing the most aggressive thing at the most aggressive time, and all other options are weak to the point of very nearly being anti-American. And yet as Iraq has shown, such actions can be not just unwise, but catastrophically destructive. For Joe Lieberman, asserting his opponents to be complacent or unpatriotic or appeasers is the only possible rhetorical option remaining, and he lacks the wisdom to leave it unused.

I can think of only one example of recent Democratic appeasement: the way Senator Reid and others have constantly appeased Joe Lieberman, in spite of Lieberman's constant and increasingly rabid attempts to undermine his previous party. As has been amply demonstrated by Joe himself, appeasement does not work.

What are the symptoms of a Lieberman Derangment Syndrome?

Perhaps we see, along with the hatred for President Bush, "the acute onset of paranoia" in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies - nay - the very existence of - Senator Joseph Lieberman (hat tip: Dr. Sanity)

For the hard left, Lieberman's just simply evil. By running as an independent in 2006, he defeated the handpicked Kos candidate, Ned Lamont, thus thwarting the radical netroots' push toward a filibuster proof majority in the Senate with which to launch their legislative drive for a neo-Stalinist collectivist state.

The left hates Lieberman, who serves as the focal point of their anger and displacement: The real evil is not the terrorists who took down the World Trade Center, or al Qaeda in Iraq, or the murderers who beheaded Daniel Pearl - that is, the genuinely despicable elements of world evil and violence. Nope, for the left, the true scourge of humanity is the Connecticut Senator (and his "war-loving" allies), with his support for winning a war that Democrats backed in 2002, a war the party authorized with its bipartisan support for the congressional authorization on Iraq.

Thank goodness for Joe!

See also, "Paranoid Discomfort."