The recent David Brooks' column which included the extraordinarily asinine assertion
that...
What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition...
...was roundly criticized and thoroughly dissected by the blogsphere. Well, today's New York Times is carrying six letters to the editor with reactions to the Brooks' column. And if these letters are representative of public opinion, Brooks is even more irrelevant than we thought...as is Joe Lieberman.
How callous of Mr. Brooks to minimize the death, maiming and blinding of more than 21,000 young Americans, the affliction of tens of thousands with combat-related psychiatric illnesses...in a senseless war as somehow just "one issue."
Senator Lieberman remains a leading proponent of this disastrous war, which he advocated from the start. Holding him accountable at the ballot box for this fiasco is not an inquisition; it's democracy.
Not only does the writer nail the heart of the matter, he's from Connecticut...
Next, a New Yorker says:
By calling that opposition an "inquisition," David Brooks desecrates democracy at work. One hopes that enough enlightened voters will recognize the ploy and choose to oust an apologist for the Bush administration's abuse of power and ill-gained spoils.
Desecrating democracy perfectly describes Brooks' words and as for the writer's hopes, from her lips to God's ear.
Now you didn't think we'd go six-for-six, did you? The third letter parrots a hypocritical Lieberman talking point:
At this time of demonizing "the other," it is refreshing to have someone admit that he doesn't have a monopoly on truth and that there may be some merit in more than one position or ideology.
What the writer and Brooks apparently choose to overlook is that Lieberman doesn't hold the monopoly on truth either, and that Lamont's positions are finding merit where it counts...with the voters. Democracy is an inquisition and a differing opinion is demonizing? How Rovian.
Next up is a Connecticut voter who says:
Now I don't understand why Mr. Lieberman and other Democratic senators aren't denouncing this Republican president's disastrous actions in Iraq. At least four months before President Bush invaded Iraq, a lot of us knew with dead certainty that he was determined to launch this illegal and immoral war. Why didn't they know it?
This is no inquisition; I simply want better representatives.
I think we can count this person firmly in the Lamont camp.
The fifth letter offers a viewpoint that is exactly what the Lieberman campaign doesn't want to hear:
What has liberalism, whose essential bias is the protection of political and civil liberties, got to do with opposition to an unjust war?
Many of us conservatives can't help but see an analogy between this misrepresentation and the portrayal of the war against Saddam Hussein as a war against terrorism.
I once proudly identified Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and myself as fellow New (conservative) Democrats. I won't vote for Mr. Lieberman in the primary, but I'm still a New Democrat.
If Lieberman does make his run as an independent, aspiring to be Sen. Lieberman (Lieberman-CT), this person is the sort that he needs to peel away from Ned Lamont. Hopefully this writer's opinion is the rule rather than the exception.
Four of the five letters denounced both Brooks and Lieberman and by extension, Bush's Iraq policy. So it's only apppropriate that the final letter slams Bush...I'd like think it was written by a Kossack:
He writes that Ned Lamont, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman's opponent, "has neither expertise in foreign affairs nor any specific knowledge of Iraq, and he has struggled to come up with a plan for what we should now do there."
Holy synapse misfiring! Doesn't that describe George W. Bush to a T?
Jacob Plotkin, come on down!