The Vileness of Joe Lieberman

As part of his ongoing campaign to make himself as buffoonish as possible, Joe Lieberman devised a brilliant idea for dealing with American terror suspects:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) thinks he's found a work-around on the whole Miranda rights debate for U.S. citizens accused of terrorism: Strip their citizenship and ship them to Guantanamo.

Lieberman plans to introduce a bill that would amend a decades-old law aimed at yanking citizenship from U.S. citizens who fight for a foreign military.

“I'm now putting together legislation to amend that to [specify that] any individual American citizen who is found to be involved in a foreign terrorist organization, as defined by the Department of State, would be deprived of their citizenship rights,“ Lieberman said Tuesday.

In other words, if the government says you are a terrorist then you have no rights.

This sort of thing makes Lieberman a darling of the right, a group populated primarily by pussies. Acting tough is about as close as they ever get to the real thing. That is why they are constantly prancing around with their guns and trying to out-sadist each other in contemplating the interrogation of suspects. They are perfectly happy to have a big, intrusive government so long as they believe it will only be other people who will be affected.

Andrew Sullivan aptly sums up Lieberman's (and John McCain's) insanity:

The appalling behavior of John McCain and Joe Lieberman this past week underlines what a bullet this country missed by electing Barack Obama president. This, remember, was McCain's original dream-ticket - before a forty hour Google search unleashed brain-dead boobage across the land. Look at their instincts: find a citizen terror suspect and tear up the constitution to ... do what exactly? McCain won't say. Or: strip the guy of citizenship immediately and then get to work on him.

And later:

Now recall that McCain and Lieberman were celebrated in Washington for their alleged maturity, wisdom, and elder statesmen experience. They are in fact adolescent hysterics, whose terrorized Manichean view of the world sees nothing but an existential struggle and the imperative to win it. We would have been electing Cheney to a third term. And we barely knew it.

Well said!

Here is Lieberman commenting on the big oil spill:

In a recent interview with National Journal, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.) not only defended offshore oil drilling, but also sought to downplay the current Gulf coast crisis, saying “accidents happen.”

“There were good reasons for us to put in offshore drilling, and this terrible accident is very rare in drilling,” Lieberman said in the interview. “I mean, accidents happen. You learn from them and you try not to make sure they don't happen again.”

According to National Journal, Lieberman also said he would continue pushing for an expansion of offshore drilling to be included in the Senate's energy bill:

When asked whether the spill would change any of the drilling language he and Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have developed, Lieberman said, “I don't think so; certainly not to lead us to remove it.” He said the draft would allow drilling as close as 75 miles from the U.S. coastline.

Does Lieberman also support requiring elementary precautions that would greatly reduce the risk of these kinds of accidents? I doubt it.

The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.

Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.”

The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are “failsafe.”

Anyone think Lieberman would have demurred from that conclusion?

“Drill baby drill” is still the energy policy of one of the two major political parties in this country. Are we so stupid and short-sighted that we really think punching more holes in the ocean floor to drink up the last few drops of oil, running these kinds of risks, constitutes any sort of long-term solution to anything? Everyone knows the days of cheap oil are rapidly coming to an end. But anyone suggesting that we should consider getting more of our energy from renewable sources is quickly branded a commie ecofanaitc or some such. Even Obama was onboard the drilling bandwagon, for heaven's sake.