Lieberman Warns Party On Ideology

(Hey, Didn't You LOSE The Last Election?)

In a cheap and disgustingly transparent ploy for attention, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), one half of the ticket that LOST the 2000 Presidential elections, was out dispensing "how to get elected" advice to the Democratic Party yesterday. He attacked former Vermont governor Howard Dean and several other rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, arguing that they have embraced extreme left ideas that threaten to return the party to political exile and should be more earnest in sucking up to the President and the lowlife rednecks and bible freaks who support him.

Stay out of the political wilderness, kids. Stay out of a political Siberia, kids. Steer to the extreme right and we'll all be happy.

"I share the anger of my fellow Democrats with George Bush and the wrong direction he has taken our nation," he whined in a speech at the National Press Club. "But the answer to his outdated, extremist ideology is not to be found in outdated extremes of our own. That path will not solve the challenges of our time and it could well send us Democrats back to the political wilderness for a long time. My opponents in the Democratic Party are a bunch of Marxists and Terrorist-Lovers," he elaborated later.

Like the current unmitigatable wilderness he and "Mr Personality", Al Gore, led America into?

Surprisingly, Lieberman saved his toughest criticism for Dean, the candidate who was just on the cover of every major news publication journal in America and has a growing groundswell of support that leaves Lieberman in the dust. Whereas Dean has a passionate opposition to the Iraq war and has pugnaciously confronted Bush at every turn like a man, Lieberman believes the correct strategy to spew mealy-mouthed nasal-whining criticism that reminds one more of Max Wright, who played Willie Tanner in the repulsively unfunny sitcom ALF, than a presidential candidate.

Lieberman, who was one of Bush's strongest supporters in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and thus, clearly delusional and irrational, has been struggling to find his voice in a year when his centrist ideas and restrained demeanor sound like sycophantic mewling and have appeared out of sync with many Democratic activists. So, it appears he has chosen to take on the voice of Father Know Best who prefers that Democrats line up with their lips puckered when it comes time for elections.

A week ago, another political virtuoso, Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), of which Lieberman is a former chairman, warned that the party is in danger of being captured by the "far ideological left" and other DLC leaders warned that a Dean nomination could result in the kind of landslide defeats Democrats suffered in 1972 and 1984.

"Before you know it, the Democratic Party will be filled with Satanists, Communists and Pedophiles!" Mr. Bayh cleverly counseled.

As Lieberman was delivering his broadside against what he saw as the leftward drift of the party, Gephardt was in New York offering substance instead of scared-running rhetoric. He spoke about more elements of an economic plan that would eliminate all of Bush's tax cuts and use much of that money to fund a health care plan designed to provide near universal access to health insurance, including a rise in the minimum wage, accelerated spending from the Highway Trust Fund and a federally guaranteed national development bank to help states through their fiscal problems. Lieberman's whining is aimed to drown out criticism of his "ideological heroes in the Cheney Administration".

Lieberman, in a moment of confusion, was equally unsparing in his criticism of Bush, saying the president "has left our country dangerously unprepared to defend against and defeat the threat of terrorism. And his leadership has clearly driven our great American economy right into the ditch." However, when members of the Administration complained to him, Lieberman withdrew his remarks and noted that like the Administration, he believed that "killing is the answer" as a foreign policy and the "economy can only be helped by more enormous tax breaks for the wealthy."

During the question period yesterday, Lieberman brushed aside repeated inquiries about the state of his campaign. "I feel good about where this campaign is," he said at one point. "I'm in the position I'm most comfortable in, that of a loser" At another he vowed, "I'm not going to stand back and let this party be taken over by Marxists and Trotskyites who would bring us to the political wilderness again."

Of course, last night, during a staged romancing of organized labor and the A.F.L-C.I.O., a very liberal and left wing contingent within the Democratic Party, Lieberman had no such shrill premonitions about the future of the party and kept his mouth shut when it came to bashing his own party for the sake of publicity.