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Holy Joe, Corporate Joe, G.I. Joe
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jun 01, 2006 12:34pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| News Date | Thursday, July 10, 2003 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Most of the mainstream press corps keeps presenting a sanitized version of Lieberman’s bio, but some of the things he’d rather forget are well worth remembering now that he’s a national candidate.
Lieberman denounced the case for affirmative action as “an un-American argument because it’s based on averages, not individuals,” and went on to praise Ward Connerly’s Proposition 209, the misnamed “California Civil Rights Initiative,” which outlawed affirmative action: “I can’t see how I could be opposed to it, because it basically is a statement of American values.” The year before, the New Haven Advocate’s excellent Paul Bass — who’s covered Lieberman for 22 years — wrote, “After meeting with racist scholar [and Bell Curve author] Charles Murray, Lieberman promoted Murray’s idea of taking children away from mothers on welfare and putting them in new government-run orphanages
As a senator, Lieberman continued his path to the right. For example, Lieberman has a long record of political homophobia. Lieberman, who told the New Haven Advocate that “homosexuality is wrong,” joined with notorious homo-hater Jesse Helms in voting to take away federal funding from schools that counsel suicidal gay teens that it’s okay to be gay. On gays in the military, Lieberman has enunciated the now-discredited canard that “homosexual conduct can harm unit cohesion and effectiveness.” (Tell that to the dozens of countries, from England to Israel, that permit openly gay troops in their armed forces.)
Holy Joe told a Detroit congregation never to imagine “that morality can be maintained without religion.” This position was denounced as “unsettling” by no less than the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL), which released a letter to him arguing tartly that “To even suggest that one cannot be a moral person without being a religious person is an affront to many highly ethical citizens.”
Prayer in the schools? Holy Joe lined up with the GOP’s religious zealots to push it repeatedly in the Senate. Subsidizing parochial schools at the expense of public education? Holy Joe has sponsored legislation to give parents vouchers to send their kids to parochial schools, draining money from the public schools to which most Americans send their kids. And Lieberman just last year joined with rabid gay basher Rick Santorum — the Pennsylvania Republican who compared same-sex love to bestiality and incest — to co-sponsor George Bush’s faith-based initiatives, praising Bush’s “leadership” in tearing down the constitutional barrier between church and state. The faith-based initiatives turned out in practice to be a political-patronage operation for churches and ministers that support Bush.
Wall Street Journal detailed how Lieberman was the insurance industry’s “go-to guy on the Democratic side of the aisle.” He teamed up with Dick Armey to successfully limit lawsuits stemming from auto accidents by permitting lower rates for drivers who forfeit their right to sue for pain and suffering; and sponsored bills that limited legal damages against tobacco producers, HMOs and drug companies as well as against asbestos manufacturers and any business that manufactured a defective product — and, by extension, protecting their insurance companies. The chief lobbyist for the American Tort Reform Association — a lobby funded by manufacturers — told the National Law Journal, “If it were not for Lieberman, there would never have been a Biomaterials Access Act,” which immunized corporate giants such as Dow and Dupont against lawsuits for defective components used in the manufacture of medical implants. |
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