Lieberman goes over to the Dark Side

STAFF THREATENS VOTERS WITH ARREST FOR MERELY WAITING IN HIS OFFICE TO SPEAK WITH HIM

by John Charlton

(Dec. 16, 2009) — Senator Joe Lieberman was always known for his liberal politics.  He was, after all, Al Gore’s running mate in their failed 2000 bid for the White House.  He kept silent then, when Gore attempted to steal the election through litigation.

Though in recent years there was hope that he’d move more to the center, after the Democratic Party of CT ostracized him, and he broke with the DNC over his desire to have tougher standards against pornography in video games.

Recently his hold-out against certain provisions of the Health Care Bill made him a national hero.

But all that has changed recently.  Lieberman has now signed on to the bill, after the provision for expanding coverage was eliminated.

And his decision to join with the regime of tyranny, election fraud, and dictatorship has taken on a new dark side today, when, according to ParcBench Blog members of his staff threatened peaceful, well dressed voters with arrest for the “crime” of waiting in his Senatorial office to speak with him.  Parcbench writes:

All across the country, Senators refuse our calls, ignore our emails, throw away our letters and refuse to meet with us.. Today — in the Senate office building — Senate staff literally threatened to arrest three members of the Tea Party Patriots, including two National Coordinators. When one of the most “moderate” Senators threatens to have well groomed, quiet, cooperative tea partiers arrested simply for sitting in the office waiting to meet with a Senator, it is clear that representative democracy is on its death bed in this country.

As RightWing News reports, Mark Meckler, a Tea Party organizer was one of those threatened.  (Their report republishes the video of ParcBench on the incident, and also carries numerous photos of the Tea Party protest, yesterday.)

Rush Limbaugh spoke on Obama’s strategy to play ball with Lieberman and how it worked.

Now, I also think that this Medicare expansion was a ruse from the start.  In negotiations, if you’ve ever been in any involving, say, your compensation or representing a company or something, you always, in preparing for negotiations, you put in what are called throwaways, things that you demand be included in the deal that you secretly will throw away or give away in order to get a final deal, and both sides do this.  Except our side.  We don’t do anything but accept the premise and needle with it around the margins.

And I think that this Medicare expansion was a throwaway from the get-go.  I don’t think they were ever serious about this, and I’ll tell you why.  Simple logic.  There’s no way in a bill that cuts Medicare $500 billion you can expand it to cover people down to 55 years of age.  The two just don’t go together.  So what they do, they raise the Medicare expansion as an issue at the last minute when Dingy Harry is having problems, and then they kill it a few days later on the desires of Lieberman.

This gives them cover to get Lieberman on their side, and then others say it’s now okay to vote for this, since they got rid of the Medicare expansion.  As I say I think it was a ruse from day one, it was a strategy.  You put out a false option, you have a Senator object to it, a Senator who is thought to be a moderate — Lieberman — with an independent party label instead of Democrat, and he says, “I can’t vote for this.  Why, there’s no way I’m going to vote for that.  I’m not going to vote for this with the public option in it, either.”  So you give in, you give in to Lieberman, you give in to the so-called moderates, you claim there’s no Medicare expansion and no public option and you get your 60 votes, and you look like you’re compromising, when you’re not compromising at all because you never intended the Medicare expansion to be real in the first place.  It was just designed to get Lieberman in there and it looks like it works.

The Post & Email predicted such a maneuver in November, but we regret having been prescient on this score.