Fox News Sunday (Fox) – 9 a.m. in Washington – Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman D-Conn., will be on, sounding hawkish yet soothingly sensible about the war.
Honest to God, at first I figured maybe they were just injecting a little verbal wink there, a coy play on Lieberman's real reputation, as opposed to his conventional show-bidness-for-ugly-people rep die-cast for him by the Serious Stenographers. Guess not:
Face the Nation (CBS) – 10:30 a.m. in Washington – If you don’t have TiVo, get it, because you have to watch this one, too. Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., will talk about the Senate Iraq resolution that will surely dominate news from Capitol Hill next week. Bob Schieffer and executive producer Carin Pratt are gracious hosts, so don’t be surprised if Schieffer refers to Specter as “Mr. Chairman,” for old time’s sake.
What the two Republican senators don’t want to hear: Any question containing the words Bush, White House or president.
What Sen. Webb doesn’t want to get into: Look for McConnell, the Senate minority leader – or Senate Republican leader, as the GOP prefers – to preview a trap his party is likely to spring for Democrats next week: An amendment saying they’ll pay for the troops for the surge into Iraq that President Bush wants, giving Republicans their sound bite: “They’re saying we disagree with the president’s policy, so we’re voting to fund it.” Ss-nap!
It makes my ball-sack hurt; it makes The Note seem not-asinine. That takes real effort.
This ties to the notion I've been beating on lately, that these guys have abdicated their roles as seekers and disseminators of facts to become political bookies, tweakers of odds and purveyors of talking points. Non-sports fans think it's silly when NFL pre-game shows start prognosticating Super Bowl contenders during the pre-season; how fucking dumb is this shit, playing tiresome electoral guessing games twenty-one months before the damned election?
Referring back to Lieberman, there is nothing either "soothing" nor "sensible" about what he's advocating, because what he's advocating (if we think out the practical ramifications instead of reading half-baked snark from WaPo pool boyz) is More Of The Same. What Lieberman is implicitly -- hell, just about explicitly -- saying is that even though the Cheney administration has been right about nothing, they deserve yet another last chance, and if we disagree with that stupidity, then we're emboldening and embiggening the terrists. Sorry Joe, looks like the current policies are doing that just fine as it is.
Lieberman has made this showboating, preening exercise in self-referential "independence" a priority over everything else. He has made it clear that his interests reside more with critiquing and calumniating his own party than in working with them. I find that astonishing -- Lieberman literally prefers making a show of stroking what is perhaps the most incompetent, corrupt administration this nation has ever seen, than working with his own fucking party. Worse yet, this is consistently characterized as "sensible centrism", or some such dickless nonsense.
I realize that these clowns just think they're being clever, that they're bringing some game to the drudgery of the Sunday morning kabuki. They don't seem to get that that's the problem. They're like the guy in the old joke, shoveling elephant shit at the circus, who just can't quit show business. They are responsible for getting an honest handle on these pricks, and not just shoveling the CW forward another yard or two. Matt Taibbi can't do it all for them, but then, he probably isn't allowed to all the kewl kidz parties either.
[Link via Atrios and Think Progress.]
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