Lieberman to Play Zell Miller Role at the Republican Convention

Posted by Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake at 6:32 AM on February 12, 2008.

Looks like Holy Joe is slithering toward the helmet hair and polyester confab known as the Republican National Convention.

Sneak preview offered in this YouTube -- expect the words "the conscience of the Democratic Party" to be uttered more than once.

Meanwhile, let me fully endorse this counterprogramming note from Spencer Ackerman, who recalls Jeanne Kirkpatrick's appearance at the 1984 Republican National Convention:

On Aug. 20, 1984, Kirkpatrick, the arch anti-communist who served as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, took the microphone at the GOP convention in Dallas and inaugurated a tradition. Kirkpatrick was, she told her audience, a "lifelong Democrat." The trouble, she had come to realize, was that she was also an American. So in an electrifying speech that was at turns vitriolic and sentimental, she implied very strongly that you couldn't really be both.

And on and on in that vein. In one brief speech, Kirkpatrick introduced the world to the phrases "Blame America First" and "San Francisco Democrat"--well understood to mean "Faggot." Subtly, "San Francisco Democrat" had another purpose: it differentiated the alleged radicals in San Francisco from the salt-of-the-earth, America-loving Democrats that could now safely vote for Ronald Reagan.

It was demagogic, incendiary, and ugly. And it was also a masterstroke. The conversion narrative has been a staple in the rise of the New Right since it was new: After all, Reagan himself famously said he never left the Democratic Party, the party left him. But by connecting that sentiment to national security, Kirkpatrick gave her grievance myth a sense of world-historical importance, all before the television cameras. It was a template repeated, among other places, at the 2004 GOP convention by a rabid Zell Miller. Expect Kirkpatrick's bile to be recycled by Joe Lieberman this summer in Minneapolis.

Webb can top it all. He can start out with his family's extremely long history of military service, stretching back countless generations through to Webb's son, a Marine veteran of Fallujah. The Webbs serve when called--but the contract of service is for the country never to call upon men to give their lives in a futile, unnecessary cause. After Vietnam, Webb can say, he became a Republican because the GOP seemed to understand that--and because they also understood that there are certain things that are worth fighting for when viewed through clear, dispassionate eyes.

But somewhere along the line the GOP lost its way. His campaign for Senate in 2006 was predicated on the idea, at least implicitly. As much as he continued to resent John Kerry's outspoken anti-war advocacy in the 1970s, he could nevertheless understand that, this time around, the greater enemy wasn't overzealous opposition to a disastrous war, but the disastrous war itself. And the source of that disaster is in a militarism gone out of control, unmoored from any intelligence conception of the national interest, cheapened by its condescending view of soldiers as mere tools of foreign policy or else as political wedge issues, and indicative of a broader corruption at the heart of an exhausted GOP.

Tagged as: iraq, webb, lieberman, election84, miller. gop convention, kirkpatrick

Jane Hamsher is the founder of FireDogLake. Her work has also appeared on the Huffington Post, Alternet and The American Prospect.