Lieberman Explains The Fall of the Democrats

Joe Lieberman catalogues the moral and ethical degeneracy of his former Democratic colleagues as they have placed the desire for political power above our national security interests. This partial transcript of Lieberman’s speech appears in today’s NY Post:

BETWEEN 2002 and 2006, there was a battle within the Democratic Party - a battle I was part of. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework that President Bush articulated for the War on Terror as our own - because it was our own. It was our legacy from [Presidents] Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Clinton.

We could rightly criticize the Bush administration when it failed to live up to its own rhetoric or when it bungled the execution of its policies. But I felt that we should not minimize the seriousness of the threat from Islamist extremism or the fundamental rightness of the muscular, internationalist and morally self-confident response that Bush had chosen in response to it.

But that wasn't the choice most Democrats made.

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign-policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the War on Terror or to strengthen our democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America's moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran . . .

Even as evidence has mounted that Gen. David Petraeus' new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving . . .

. . . There is something profoundly wrong - something that should trouble all of us - when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyperpartisan sentiment in the Democratic base - even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.

For me, this episode reinforces how far the Democratic Party has strayed . . .

That is why I call myself an Independent Democrat today. It is because my foreign-policy convictions are the convictions that have traditionally animated the Democratic Party - but they exist in me today independent of the Democratic Party, which has largely repudiated them. . .

Read the entire transcript here. Lieberman is an old school liberal. The only way to describe the Democratic Party today, given their elevation of rhetoric and emotion over reason and intellectual honesty, is as neo-liberals.