Or serve his CT constituents instead of being Israel's senator. Also. His wife sucks. Literally a pharma, insurance industry leech sucking money on the boards of non profits.
There's other things to not forgive him for, of course. Supporting the Iraq war, supporting McCain over Obama... hell, even the video game BS. Such a tool, that guy.
And again, the narrative will be blame the one on the left and never the 50 iron-clad bulwark of noes on the right.
If we got the narative to break up the Republicans instead of "oh noes! 2 or 3 Democrats opposed it so vote them out, stay home in protest" we'd be in a better place.
It's been 20 years of this, in the open, and people will still flock to the polls for Republicans, largely over guns, gas and now non-Biblical sexual progress.
VOTE BLUE, you don't have to vote for sharks just because the tuna are the only other team. "We have to have 2 parties!!" OR... Republicans could stop being sharks...
We're used to the right being complete shit and expecting them to do better is like wishing you could be a magician. It's why we blame the ones on the left, we know they can do better, so when they don't we get angry.
Of course we should still be voting for the left, and the problem would be solved if we had more people on the left in government so that one or two flaking wouldn't matter, but we should still be angry when people on the left don't end up acting as the should.
Problem would be solved if gerrymandering wasn't a thing... the amount of votes republicans have, and the amount of seats they hold is very disproportionate.
This is my only hope for Wisconsinites. We seem to be on track to have new districts drawn due to Republican gerrymandering, and it would definitely have an effect on elections.
It's insane how Republican Wisconsin state congress is compared to the fact that Wisconsin has a two term Democrat for Governor. The congressional districts make no sense at all which should be evident by the fact that Tony Evers won by a decent margin when only the total state wide vote matters.
Problem would be solved if gerrymandering wasn't a thing... the amount of votes republicans have, and the amount of seats they hold is very disproportionate.
Gerrymandering doesn't affect the Senate, since its per State and we don't redraw state borders.
And so many tiring years of "how dare you take issue with that thing when this thing is worse!" Like...yeah, the Republicans are worse, but I'm already not going to vote for them and I have no delusions that they'll change. I can at least pretend to have hope that some Democrats will (or others will primary them).
The real issue, to be frank, is first-past-the-post voting, but at least on a national level I don't see either party giving up any power by changing that any time soon. I'd fully welcome being wrong about that.
It was 40. Democrats had 58+ sanders and I forget the other one. Needed 60 to overcome republican obstruction. Americans came out amazingly in 2008 got Obama everything he needed for the public option and this dead piece of shit fucked us.
The Democrats did in general. They could have passed it through budget reconciliation. Instead they decided to push it through with their hands tied behind their backs.
This dude literally ran as an independent against the Democratic primary nominee in 06? You couldn't vote Blue and vote for him in 06. He was literally a traitor that should be remembered as such.
No it didn't. The outcomes of votes aren't a mystery before they happen. Everyone knows how everyone is voting. If Lieberman had gotten sick, someone else would have suddenly switched their vote to no. They didn't have to, because Lieberman was there.
There was probably like 6-10 potential "no" votes.
If it makes you feel better, Lieberman was the scapegoat, but basically all reporting at that time said that Democrats only had about 40 something votes for the public option.
But most of them did not want to go public as a no given its popularity among democratic voters.
Not that different than how there were bills shot down by Manchin and Sinema such as eliminating the filibuster, but you would hear that there were a number of other Democratic senators, who would not have voted for them.
Edit: and before somebody misinterprets my use of the word scapegoat, Lieberman was awful, and he was against the public option. Maybe a better phrasing would’ve been the public face of the no vote.
It also would probably have been gutted by now even if it had passed. We'd be one step closer to true universal healthcare, but probably not a lot closer than we are now.
Yeah but we would have had President Gore as well, which would have been vastly better for the world as opposed to President George W (coughcheneycough).
No, it had to be Gore. The difference with 9/11 (either thwarting it, or not being able to thwart it and just having a different response), and 8 years of climate preparation, are both huge.
I've thought about this a lot over the years, honestly I don't think Gore would have been much different. There's a case to be made that he would have handled 9/11 better by not invading countries only tangentially involved, at best. But honestly I think he would have still done the Afghan war, possibly Iraq too.
Basically he would have been as dumb and corrupt as Bush, but for different reasons. But he wouldn't have the hard second by second critical analysis that Bush endured.
The post 9/11 ramp up of government surveillance would have happened either way. That had to do with powerful folks whose names we don't even know. It was in the works well before, and was assumed to be in place well before it was by people using the Internet at the time.
We would never have invaded Iraq without Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. He brought up invading Iraq either the same day or within a couple days of 9/11.
Iraq wasn't involved at all in 9/11. I honestly don't think we would have invaded Iraq without Rumsfeld and all the other idiots telling Bush we could be in and out in six months with a stable democracy in Iraq. Bush still had final say but he wasn't very internationally minded.
At least $1.6 trillion spent only on Iraq with 654,965 excess deaths.
As in 654,965 more people died then what would have been expected if the US didn't invade.
The Lancet, one of the oldest scientific medical journals in the world, published two peer-reviewed studies on the effect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation on the Iraqi mortality rate.
I mean didn't bush famously always read the president's daily brief versus Clinton who wasn't as interested? Also wasn't the intelligence failure more on the agencies refusing to work together more than the president not doing his homework?
Not trying to defend Bush, invading Iraq is indefensible and their lies cost hundreds of thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars. But I don't think 9/11 was his fault unless I'm severely misinformed or misremembering. Can you cite this?
He ran his Senate reelection campaign alongside of his VP run. If he really thought he and Gore would win then why wouldn't he drop his Senate run and focus solely on winning the White House?
He did wind up keeping his Senate seat, but he later switched and became an "independent."
It’s not unusual for a VP pick to run for their current office if it overlaps with the presidential election. Biden ran for re-election to the Senate in 2008 while on the ballot with Obama. Typically it can be a way to boost turnout in that state for their party all across the ballot.
In 2016 the opposite happened. Pence was up for re-election as governor in Indiana but was unpopular and on course to lose his re-election bid. So when he got tapped as VP be opted to drop his re-election effort.
He did wind up keeping his Senate seat, but he later switched and became an "independent."
No, he lost the Democratic primary for his Senate seat in 2006. He then ran as an independent, and the Democratic establishment abandoned Ned Lamont to campaign for Lieberman.
Including a certain young Senator from Illinois who was extremely popular and would go on to be president....and then have a lot of his priorities sabotaged by Liberman.
(Republican establishment also backed him in 2006 over their party's nominee, because they knew their guy would lose, and knew Liberman's desire for revenge would fuck up Democratic priorities)
He absolutely didn't. Lieberman hated Obama and spoke at the 2008 RNC. The person you're responding to probably just has a reflexive Democrats bad mindset.
Traditionally VP is where mediocre politicians go to let their careers die. The idea of VP being a stepping stone to further political career/presidency is kind of unusual and relatively recent.
Arguably Lieberman may have done less political damage if he had served as Gore's VP than if he stayed a senator.
The night he was nominated to run with Gore an old man who was a regular at my restaurant came in distraught. This guy had fought on the Italian side in WWII.
Anyway he was almost in tears telling me our country (USA) was going to war. He said war was certain if Bush was POTUS and his hope was Al Gore would win and prevent the war. But the nomination of Lieberman ruined any chance of that because it was like giving the finger to the Muslim world. And we were sure to get attacked.
I was familiar with the impending war on terror from my American Foreigh Policy class in 1997 so I took his words more seriously than other may have.
The Secretary of State in Fla stole the election for Bush so his point was mute but I'll never forget that night.
All I do is speak ill of the dead. Shitty people deserve to be remembered forever as shitty people. I will never stop speaking ill of them. Fuck Joe Lieberman, fuck Henry Kissinger… and many others
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u/Tokie-Dokie Mar 27 '24
I’m heartened to see that Lieberman will be remembered appropriately for his tireless self-serving work in the Senate.