The return of Lieberman

You remember Joe Lieberman. He was Connecticut’s most prominent U.S. senator in the Bush years when he defended the president’s war and campaigned for his Republican successor. But Joe faded as his colleague, Chris Dodd, dominated the news with his defection to Iowa, his mortgage deal, the Irish cottage and all the money he was getting from the banks and brokers he was supposed to watch.

Well, Joe’s back. There’s a war to worry about again and wars are Joe’s preserve, though he may be a bit rusty. For months, he and the president — who forgave his apostasy in the 2008 campaign — were in agreement about the importance of Afghanistan, “the necessary war.â€

But now that President Obama is having second thoughts about sending 30,000 more troops to prop up a corrupt and incompetent regime, Joe had to act because Joe Lieberman never saw a corrupt and incompetent regime he didn’t like.

The other day, Joe said we should send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan because that’s what we would have done if the Nazis had regrouped and tried to take over Germany after World War II.

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But the Nazis didn’t regroup and try to take over Germany after World War II, did they? No, they didn’t, so what was Joe talking about? We’ll let him speak for himself as he did with one of his favorite interviewers, Neil Cavuto of Fox News, to make the case for escalating the American presence in Afghanistan. In doing so, he sort of admitted indulging in the last refuge of the right-wing analogy creators, the good, old fashioned Nazi analogy:

“It’s more like, and I hate to use the analogy, it is like the Second World War. Shortly after it was over, if the Nazis began to form again and tried to take back Germany from a new democratic government, what would we have done? We would not have stood by and let it happen!â€

You may want to read that again. When you do, you’ll notice Joe said “if†the Nazis had reorganized, we wouldn’t have let them do it. He’s certainly right about that, but what it all has to do with President Obama’s ultimate decision on Afghanistan is not terribly clear. If we had won the war in Afghanistan, occupied the country with half a million or so troops and the Taliban and al-Qaeda tried to make a comeback, we undoubtedly wouldn’t have allowed it.

However, we haven’t won the war in Afghanistan or anywhere else since Ronald Reagan’s war in Grenada, so Joe really doesn’t make much sense when he compares what hasn’t happened in Afghanistan to what didn’t happen in Germany in the autumn of 1945. Maybe he’s off his game. After all, it’s been a while.

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Joe’s had a pretty exciting run, from 2000, when he was briefly elected vice president with Al Gore, to his reconciliation with Obama after he supported the losing Republican in the 2008 election. In between, he survived a really awful campaign for president only to be surpassed in awfulness by Chris Dodd’s run for the office four years later. Then he nearly lost his Senate seat when his party rejected him in 2006, but he came back strongly as Bush’s and McCain’s favorite ersatz Democrat.

And when his issue, fighting wars, was upstaged by the collapse of the economy and health-care reform, Joe all but disappeared. But now, there’s room again for Joe. There always is when there’s a war to be escalated.

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It’s also time for him to begin thinking about 2012 and the choice he must make between retirement or his fifth Senate campaign. The online magazine Politico included Joe in its survey of Senate Democrats who have already raised a million dollars in anticipation of a run in three years, reporting Lieberman had $1.4 million in the bank as of June 30.

He’ll need that and a lot more if Dick Blumenthal decides he wants more of a legacy than being the longest-running state attorney general and goes for the Democratic nomination. Blumenthal will be 66 in 2012, so this may be his very last chance.

Apparently not giving Blumenthal a thought, Lieberman told Politico he was unsure whether he would run the next time as a Democrat or an independent.

“Or a Republican,†Lieberman jokingly added.â€

It’s good to see he still has his sense of humor — along with those memories of the Nazi Putsch in the fall of ’45.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.