Two weeks ago, I claimed we were reaching "Peak I Told You So's," where the progressive base was consistently proven to be right about everything. Well, maybe we haven't reach the peak just yet.
For one thing, in case there was any remaining doubt about Joe Lieberman functionally serving as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and its policies, now Cheney is hanging out in Lieberman's office:
A source tells us that Vice President Dick Cheney was spotted entering Joe Lieberman's Senate office today.
The Veep's press office confirms it. We'll be bringing you more on what happened soon...
And the "dean" of Lieberman defenders, David Broder, is accepting huge speaking fees from corporate PAC's on policy issues that Broder focuses on, such as health care. Harper's has the gory details on this one, documenting Broder speaking before multiple corporate health care consortiums, the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, the National Association of Manufacturers, The American Council for Capital Formation, and a holiday cruise company. This is even though, back in the 1990's, Broder wrote the following:
It's clear that some journalists now are in a market category where the amount of money that they can make on extracurricular activities raises, in my mind, exactly, and, clearly, in the public's mind, exactly the same kind of conflict-of-interest questions that we are constantly raising with people in public life. . . .
People think that we are part of the establishment and therefore part of the problem. I mean, what bothers me is the notion that journalists believe, or some journalists believe, that they can have their cake and eat it too, that you can have all of the special privileges, access and extraordinary freedom that you have because you are a journalist operating in a society which protects journalism to a greater degree than any other country in the world, and at the same time you can be a policy advocate. You can be a public performer on the lecture circuit or television. I think that's greedy.
And two years ago, he wrote the following:
"The murky area, the ones where I need to check are the ones where I get an invitation from a business group," says the Washington Post's David Broder. "We don't want to be involved with people who have too much of a stake in anything. For example, I'm doing a lot of stuff on health care so I would not speak to any group that's a major player in the health care thing."
The progressive blogosphere has a longstanding argument that so-called "bi-partisanship" is really just wealthy media and political elites drowning in the corporate trough while providing cover for conservative politicians and legislation. With Lieberman not only endorsing McCain but hanging out with Cheney, and with the ultimate proponent of non-partisanship, David Broder, mopping up huge speaking fees from corporate PAC's, it is hard to come out with any other reading other than the one we DFH's have long provided. The elite railing against partisanship is really just corporatism and conservatism sold with a better package. As the two biggest icons of elite, anti-partisan sentiment, Broder and Lieberman are proof of this thesis all by themselves.
During the primaries, there were a lot of Obama supporters in the blogosphere we accepted his "post-partisan' argument, and scolded many bloggers for continuing to be partisan. However, when many of us bloggers hear about the need for anti-partisanship, bi-partisanship, or post-partisanship, for years the likes of David Broder and Joe Lieberman have been held up as the highest examples. I haven't heard much of this talk from Obama recently, but for a long time it sounded uncomfortably similar to what we have heard for years from Lieberman and Broder. If one heard Obama but lacked the recent historical context of how anti-partisan rhetoric has been used, hopefully these further revelations about Lieberman and Broder make it much clearer. |
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