Lieberman Leaves The Building

Most seemingly endless U.S. Senate careers end with a whimper rather than a bang.

When Dennis House, the moderator of “Face the State” on WFSB Channel 3, asked Senator Joe Lieberman how he would like to be remembered by history upon his retirement, Mr. Lieberman said the question put him in mind of Winston Churchill who, when asked a similar question, said he thought he would be well remembered because he himself intended to write the history of his time and place. Immediately, Mr. Lieberman, perhaps familiar with Mr. Churchill’s voluminous writings, said he didn’t know about writing history himself, but…

Mr. Lieberman, the author of seven books -- The Power Broker (1966), a biography of the late Democratic Party chairman, John Bailey; The Scorpion and the Tarantula (1970), a study of early efforts to control nuclear proliferation; The Legacy (1981), a history of Connecticut politics from 1930 to 1980; Child Support in America(1986), a guidebook on methods to increase the collection of child support from delinquent fathers; In Praise of Public Life (2000); An Amazing Adventure (2003), reflections on his 2000 vice presidential run; and The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath (2011) -- can turn a phrase, and he is a close student of history. In that sense, while by no means as prolific as Mr. Churchill, Mr. Lieberman could be, out of office and free to roam the historical range, a man as dangerous as he is thoughtful.

So given to cogitation is the senator, that someone here in Connecticut once flung at him the sobriquet “The Hamlet of the Senate,” which stuck.

Some of Mr. Lieberman’s more recent hobby horses are term limits -- he likes them --the extreme partisanship that has made co-operation in the U.S. Senate less possible -- he hates it -- and the Electoral College --he’d prefer the president be elected by popular vote. In the course of his 23 years in the Senate, Mr. Lieberman has changed his mind or emphasis on all three issues; but, as the transcendentalists tell us, to become perfect is to have changed often. Extreme partisanship destroys collegiality, in Mr. Lieberman’s view, and the Electoral College distorts the sovereignty of voters. Out of office, Mr. Lieberman’s preferences are not likely to carry much weight. Term limits are a positive good because they prevent congressional sclerosis; of course, you must have some people in the Senate who know what they’re doing, Mr. Lieberman hastened to add.

One senses the senator has not thought deeply on the question of partisanship. Suppose – just to suppose – that one of the two major parties dedicated itself to a daily revision of the U.S. Constitution, so that the Constitution could once and forever be rescued from autodidacts who insist that the document strengthens the liberty of the people by imposing restraints on fashionable ambitions. Given such a circumstance, would not Mr. Lieberman yearn for a principled partisan opposition?

During his retirement, removed from the congressional theatre of action and inaction, Mr. Lieberman may in time produce something worthwhile on such enduring subjects. Distance clears the mind wonderfully, and a thing seen from the outside often wears a different appearance than the same thing seen from the inside, as Churchill well knew. Partisanship is related to political parties. A certain measure of partisanship must be allowed if one is to have parties at all. The abolition of political parties, some argue, would usher in political anarchy rather than the utopia envisioned by radical thinkers in the United States who continue to believe, apparently sincerely, that parties are a bar to right reason and efficient government.

Political parties are, in fact, a bar to tyranny as understood by the vanishing breed of Republicans in the age of the Caesars, many of whom longed for a restoration of the old Roman Republic. While the most representative form of government, democracy is also the weakest, subject always to popular demagogues and populists soon lifted aloft to tend the Republic and make the trains run on time. Like constitutions, vibrant political parties are a bar to overweening ambition. For those who do not believe in a politics of limits, the weakening of political parties opens the door to what one might call magical political thinking, rooted in the immodest notion that for congresspersons and presidents, as for God, all things are possible.

No Comics on the Right

It would be difficult for anyone other than politicians on the right, often the butt of his jokes, to disdain Colin McEnroe. We in the land of Mark Twain do love and forgive our humorists their hyperbole, and Mr. McEnroe is the closest thing Connecticut has to, say, Aristophanes, the famous Greek comic playwright of the 4^thcentury BC.

Time, as we know, is the enemy of sound scholarship. The ruin of Greece has left huge gaps in our understanding of, among other things, Greek comic playwrights. Only eleven of Aristophanes’ 40 plays survive virtually complete. Modern scholarship, which relies on multiple disciplines –archeology, for instance -- to fill in the gaps, shows us an Aristophanes who was an arch political critic, though he wore many masks.

In his plays, Aristophanes mercilessly and subversively routed by means of humor the larger and more offensive pretentions of his day. Plato’s beef against Aristophanes was that his play “The Clouds” slandered Socrates and so led to the philosopher’s trial and execution, perhaps an over-reaction on the part of a shameless Socratic groupie.

Greek politicians, one may imagine, were none too pleased with him. Cleon, represented in “The Knights” as a political opportunist, a sharpie and a demagogue, felt his spurs. A populist leader of the pro-war faction in Athens, Cleon was a prime target of Aristophanes’ early plays, and the inevitable suit for slander brought by Cleon against Aristophanes, only served to further inflame the playwright against him.

Aristophanes was approached one day by one of the butts of his jokes, possibly a politician held up to ridicule in one of the lost plays, who demanded whether he took ANYTHING seriously.

“Of course,” said Aristophanes, “I take comedy seriously.”

So should modern politicians. Humor is dynamite. It entices populist sensibilities and focuses them on inconvenient moments that, having raised a laugh, stick in the memory.
Mark Twain, no slouch when it came to political invective, put in the mouth of his Young Satan the following fierce defense of humor:

“Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them -- and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon-- laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug -- push it a little -- crowd it a little -- weaken it a little, century by century: But only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand."

Mr. McEnroe is a serious student of Twain’s persuasion, and he’s very good at what he does, which is to create word cartoons of politicians and their foibles, all seen from a leftist point of view. But leftists, as we all know, are not inclined to blow leftists to rags and atoms. There are no moderates or rightists, for instance, in Connecticut’s Congressional delegation,a point underscored by Mr. McEnroe:

“As a political humor writer, I am very nervous about having [Chris] Murphy and Richard Blumenthal as our senators. They're bad for business. Murphy has not been funny since Lee Whitnum barked‘Whore!!’ at him in a debate, and you can't count on that kind of thing happening very often.” Where Mr. McEnroe sees a comic wasteland, a conservative writer would see an Elysian field abloom with comic possibilities, especially in respect of Mr. Blumenthal, the political manikin.

Pity there are no comics on the right writing for Connecticut’s media, overstocked as always with liberals like Mr. McEnroe. Is there anything more depressing than an old comic in a dry month? The number of cartoonists and political comics on the right in a state that used to pride itself on its political moderation – no longer, alas – is no greater than the number of Republican politicians among its Congressional delegation, which is none, and this is very curious.

As in most other states at the beginning of the 21^stcentury, Connecticut’s two major parties have been sacked and conquered by conservatives on the right and progressives on the left, which is another way of saying that political ideas in the postmodern period have become serious. Since comedy by its nature is conservative and journalism by its nature is contrarian, one would suppose there would arise in Connecticut, chock-a-block with enthroned liberals and sans-culottes progressives, a contingent of conservative writers, commentators and journalists to kick at the progressive pricks.

This has not happened. The resistance to conservative ideas, in many other states a failure, has held in the Northeast. But moderation in both parties has been the first casualty of the 21^st century war of ideas.

On the left, the old liberals have been routed by bushy-tailed progressives; on the right, moderate Republicans have been driven out of New England by a conservative resurgence that had not yet ebbed. The last of the moderate Republicans in New England, former U.S. Representative Chris Shays, this year is running for the U.S. Senate as moderate in conservative clothing.

For Mr. McEnroe, politics has suddenly become complex. Ordinarily, a leftist with a conscience would drift toward the Democratic nominee for congress in the 5^th District Chris Donovan, Connecticut’s progressive LeonTrotsky. But alas, the shadow of the prison has fallen upon him, and Mr. McEnroe has spent too much of his career pillorying corrupt politicians – mostly Republicans– to support Donovan:

"I really should support Donovan, but I can’t. For about two decades I have trumpeted the ideals of clean government and clean elections. I have made a point of holding elected officials and candidates responsible for the actions of their subordinates. I considered Rell responsible for Lisa Moody and Rowland responsible for Peter Ellef. I hold Lisa Wilson-Foley responsible for whoever set up the deal with Rowland, even if that wasn’t her."

Here and there in Connecticut, one finds a lonely editorial voice crying out in an empty theatre that the vital center must be preserved, as one preserves in a museum the dusty artifacts of the past. Epicenters have become centers. And even these lonely voices are fierce partisans, mostly progressives – wolves, in the memorable phrase of Winston Churchill, dressed in wolves’ clothing.

Real comic possibilities would present themselves to a conservative comic writer in Connecticut – since virtually all the fish in the political pond are museum styled liberals or Eugene Debs like progressives. But it is pointless to expect a political conversion from Mr. McEnroe at this late date. He is too emotionally committed to waggery on the left.

Aristophanes, the comic writer who said he took comedy seriously, would have converted.

Obama’s Mindszenty Moment

Cardinal József Mindszenty was the Primate of Hungary and the Archbishop of Esztergom, the seat of the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary, who took refuge in the American Embassy in order to prevent the communists who had imprisoned him from deporting him.

Accused of treason, conspiracy and other offenses against the newly formed communist government, the cardinal, wise in the ways of fascist and communist interrogators, took the precaution before his arrest of writing a note denying he had been involved in any conspiracy and informing much of the world that any confession he might make as a result of duress would be fraudulent.

The always inventive communists accused the cardinal, among other charges, of having orchestrated the theft of Hungary's crown jewels, including the Crown of Saint Stephen, with the explicit purpose of crowning Otto von Habsburg emperor of Eastern Europe. Under duress the cardinal confessed he had schemed to remove the Communist government; that he had planned a Third World War, and that, once this war was won by the Americans, he himself would assume political power in Hungary.

Cardinal Mindszenty was imprisoned and tortured by both fascists and communists. Towards the end of his life, he wanted his bones to sweeten the soil of his homeland, but his communist captors had other ideas. The cardinal, always a burr in the side of the totalitarians, soon became an inconvenience to then President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the architect of Mr. Nixon’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

After much diplomatic agony, the cardinal was brought to Vienna by the Pope, Mr. Nixon having told the cardinal that it was best he bow to his fate. The primate’s seat in Hungary was vacated by the Pope in December 1973, and cardinal Mindszenty was stripped of his titles. Two years later, at the age of 83, he died in Vienna. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Hungary from Soviet tyranny, the cardinal’s remains, repatriated to Hungary by the country’s new democratically elected government, were interred in the basilica in Esztergom.

During the same time span, Mr. Nixon had become embroiled in the Watergate tar patch and, under threat of impeachment in 1974, he bowed to his fate. Hammered to his knees by the unfolding scandal, Mr. Nixon asked Mr. Kissinger to pray with him. While Cardinal Mindszenty had been a casualty of détente, Mr. Nixon fell to his knees a casualty of an always unforgiving ironfisted history.

If Hollywood were not little more than a politically petulant self-indulgent fantasy machine, the “Great Escape” of Chen Guangcheng from China’s fascist thugs would make a stirring film. Chen is telegenic, young, courageous, and the anti-hero of years of stale, soulless, propagandistic, Orwellian blather.

As a means of controlling population, Chinese fascists have for years resorted to forced abortion. Winston Churchill used to say that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Not satisfied with controlling the means of production, Chinese fascist are able to dominate their world by determining precisely who lies in the cradle.

Protesting forced abortion and the mistreatment of women under China’s misogynistic “leaders” earned Chen a rare red badge of courage. After the blind, self-taught lawyer began to advocate on behalf of victims of abusive practices such as forced abortions by China's planned parenthood officials, he was tried in 2006 on trumped up charges -- damaging property and "organizing a mob to disturb traffic" in a protest -- and sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

A blind self-taught lawyer, Chen evaded guards who had kept him under house arrest for more than 18 months in a small eastern village and made his way to Beijing on April 22. On Friday, Chen sent the following message via YouTube to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao:

"They broke into my house, and more than a dozen men assaulted my wife. They pinned her down and wrapped her in a comforter, beating and kicking her for hours. They also similarly violently assaulted me… As you see, I have escaped.”

Chen’s “Great Escape” has occurred, unfortunately, just as President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao are to sit down and discuss matters of moment in the world. Mr. Obama, according to one report,“was tight-lipped about the whereabouts of escaped Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng and his potential impact on the discussions to be held this week in Beijing.”

Asked whether Chen was under U.S. Embassy protection, the president responded during a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the White House:

"Obviously, I'm aware of the press reports on the situation in China, but I'm not going to make a statement on the issue. What I would like to emphasize is that every time we meet with China, the issue of human rights comes up.”

The issue of human rights, it may be recalled, also came up during the Mindszenty affair, a tiresome subject really. The main point in such international meet and greets is that the leaders involved in the pointless propaganda displays should make valiant attempts to snatch détente from the ragged jaws of history.

They are not always successful.