Here Come The Bastards

Bury your head deep in the sand.
Anonymity is a virtue in this day and age.
Amazing hand dexterity, flagrant misuse of security.
Better run, here they come. -- Primus

Usually when I lob a verbal scud at Holy Joe, I try to leaven the hostility by titling the post with some Daily Show reject of a pun on his name ("Say It Ain't Joe"; "Joe To Hell"; etc.).

But this time around, I don't even wanna bother. The only mystery now is whether Lieberman jumps to the Republicans (as he already has, for all practical purposes), or if the Democrats will formally oust him and prevent him from even caucusing anymore, which they should have done by now.

Lieberman's latest perfidy, slithering on to Sportin' Life Bennett's Radio Show 'n' Gamblin' Hour, and back-stabbing his own Senate leader, should be the last straw.

In the midst of a long tirade against anti-war Senators, Lieberman brought up Reid on his own, without any sort of prompting or even any mention of Reid from Bennett.

"You know, Harry Reid said a while ago that the war in Iraq is lost. It's wrong. It's not lost. In fact, I would say we're beginning to win it. We've turned the tide with the new strategy. And in fact, I cannot conceive of a circumstance in which American forces would lose the war in Iraq, on the ground in Iraq. If we lose it, it's gonna be lost here at home, in a different kind of war for public opinion and political support."

This sort of contrarian tirade might have almost had some practical utility as late as, say, 2005. But this makes no sense at all, politically or morally. It's a lie, for one; it seems pretty self-evident that the violence and chaos is escalating and dispersing, in the face of the surge. Even the military spokesmen have not been so rash as to say "we're beginning to win it". All we're going to hear from them till the end of the year is weasel words about benchmarks and metrics and such. And by then we'll be in full campaign season, listening to paunchy homilies from the phony tough and the crazy brave stumping to impressionable rubes.

In the meantime, more soldiers and civilians will die horribly, and an eviscerated country will continue to rot and degrade. Even under the ravages of Saddam's psychotic mafia, there was a professional class in Iraqi society. That's gone now, has been for a while, and will be for the next generation.

And the refugees who do escape and survive, get the privilege of pimping their daughters out:

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore. Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawerma sandwich stalls, and of women walking straight up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking, in Iraqi-accented Arabic, if the men would like to "have a cup of tea."

....

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some women are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group, they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are now about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria; the Syrian government places the figure even higher.

Given the "deteriorating" economic situation of these refugees, girls and women in "severe need" not only turn to sex work in secret, but also with the knowledge or involvement of family members, a United Nations report found last year. In many cases, the report added, "the head of the family brings clients to the house."

For this, Joe Lieberman has chosen to go on radio shows hosted by sanctimonious hypocrites, and sell out his party and his country. And for what? To be a shill for an indifferent fool and his cold-blooded eminence grise, the sort of pricks who would look you square in the eye right this second, and say with all sincerity that if they knew then what they knew now, they still would have done exactly the same thing. Indeed, Lieberman himself joins the amen chorus by asserting that the tide is turning, even as scores of innocent people continue to be smithereened and butchered on a daily basis.

There should be a special place in hell for these people.