Thoughts on this Lieberman Brouhaha

OK - the air this week has been rife with declarations that the Democrats have sold themselved down the river with their mean-spirited, divisive purge of Joe Lieberman in a Democratic primary this Tuesday. These declarations, which emanate from many of the crusty old beltway scions of the Party's moderate wing, are totally insane. I repeat, insane.

The list of politicians who have been more wrong about American foreign policy in the last years than Joe Lieberman is mercifully short. Applaud him all you want for "standing by his beliefs," but those beliefs were obviously wrong. Lieberman was punished for his continuing support for a horribly mismanaged war which is proving counter-productive in our war against Islamic terrorism. Yes, there were a lot of liberal monkeys slinging poop at Joe; that's the way the system works these days. But to conclude that Connecticut voters did anything wrong by holding Lieberman accountable for his consistent support for a failed policy - well, I don't know what to tell you. Democracy works that way, pal.

Even if I think Lieberman's a tool, it doesn't mean I think he's a bad man - he seems decent, relatively incorruptible, someone who takes moral issues seriously rather than using them as a platform. The needless vitriol directed at him seems ridiculous - he could be quaint and clueless, but I'm not sure why people found him as repugnant as, say, Bill Frist.

The Dog Days are Upon Us

I'm sick of sweating. Just plain and simple. So you know.

To make things even sweatier, I have a bike now; or, rather, a friend shoved off to Costa Rica for a year and lent us hers. I bought a lock at Bicycle Therapy and everything. Look forward to my heartrending posts detailing my experiences as a double amputee.

I've just finished Brighton Rock, part of my ongoing attempt to read every single fucking awesome word that Graham Greene ever wrote. This is one of his early masterpieces, made difficult at first because of it's lack of the classic Greene hero - fundamentally good, but driven to damnation by their own basic humanity. Brighton Rock's Pinkie is a vicious gangster and murderer who nevertheless takes the tenets of his Catholic faith for granted; so little of Greene's trademark anxiety exists in this character, whose function seems to be to threaten weak and doubting creatures.

It's not Greene's best book - while it's better than Greene's attempt at stream-of-consciousness prose (England Made Me), it's not a patch on the later masterpieces (The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Comedians). In its own shabby, low-rent kind of way, though, it presages the great themes of faith, sex, and what one character calls "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."