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Zelliciousness
By Ned | May 21, 2008
Check this shit out. Lieberman, who, remember is chair of the Senate Government Oversight Committee (making him the horribly stunted evil twin brother of Henry Waxman, I guess), apparently feels that his time is better spent exercising oversight over … YouTube videos.
As mcjoan points out, the letter that Lieberman’s writing to YouTube is officially being issued from the office of the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, meaning that he’s trying to use a Senate committee to compel YouTube to censor free speech. Because that’s just the kind of swell dude he is.
Now of course, people who initially supported Lieberman in the 2006 election are going to point to this as part of his Zell Millerfication, or whatever, but that’s simply not the case. Joe hasn’t been on speaking terms with the First Amendment for quite some time, as this pulsating canker sore of a quote from Lieberman’s Greatest Hits compilation demonstrates:
It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.
That was from early December 2005, before the great mythical Zellification. But the worse Lieberman gets, the more we’re going to here mainstream left pundits talk about Lieberman as if morning day several months ago he just woke up and decided he felt like becoming a sworn enemy of logic and sanity. When what actually happened is that the rather than Lieberman getting Zell’d, all of his fans like Joe Klein and Jon Chait got de-Lieberman’d. His positions on the issues never changed, but theirs did once they finally realized how retarded those positions were. Of course, if you’re a pundit, you can’t just come out and admit you were wrong and take the credibility hit - so instead, Chait, Klein and co. have to pretend that instead of changing their positions, the entire universe (including Lieberman) just changed around them instead.
Here’s the thing though, guys: You fucked up. You fucked up really, really bad. On the war, on your support of Lieberman, on a lot of things. And hell, it’s not like it was hard to figure out - a whole bunch of casually informed Connecticut Democratic primary voters figured it out before you guys did. But you guys are the experts, and you made some calls that were really, really, really, really fucking dumb. So instead of pretending that your pal Lieberman turned into Mr. Hyde or whatever, it’s time to suck it up, admit your dumbass mistakes, and move on. I can’t speak for all Ned Lamont supporters, but I like to think of myself as a forgiving person - just not when you’re playing games with stupid, made-up words like Zellification.
As for you, Senator Lieberman: If you’re going to try to limit free speech on YouTube, could you work on banning this first? Rivers Cuomo may not be a threat to national security, but good god is he annoying.
Topics: Civil Liberties, Congress, Terrorism, The Media |