Senator Joseph Lieberman Loves Fox; Hates Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Ambivalent on Dodd

Knowing the I-Man was under the weather this morning, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Independent from Connecticut, did what he said senators do best: talk long.
 
Over the weekend, the so-called “government whistleblower” website Wikileaks released thousands of classified intelligence documents, leading Rep. Peter King, the Republican from New York with whom Imus recently re-ingratiated himself, to call for the White House to label Wikileaks a terrorist organization.
 
“Usually I agree with Peter King, so I’d like to talk with him to see what he has in mind,” Lieberman said of the soon-to-be Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “I’m hesitant…because normally we reserve that designation for groups that fit the traditional definition of terrorists, which is that they’re using violence to achieve a political end.”
 
The behavior of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange is undeniably “terrible,” in Lieberman’s view, but he advocated the U.S. look within itself to figure out how or why an American intelligence analyst in Baghdad, allegedly the source of much of this damaging information, had access to it in the first place.
 
“It’s time to limit the number of people in the American government that have access to this kind of sensitive material,” Lieberman said, though he does not, like King, think the New York Times should be prosecuted for publishing the contents of the Wikileaks documents. “I wish the Times, just as an act of citizenship, had said, ‘No, we’re not going to publish this stuff because it’s going to do the country damage.’”
 
He noted that CNN had been offered access to the documents in advance, but turned it down because they refused to sign a pledge granting the source anonymity. “I hate CNN,” was all Imus had to say. “I wish you hadn’t brought that up.”
 
Lieberman all but agreed when he declared, “Really Fox Business is my favorite, and Fox generally. Anything Rupert Murdoch owns.”
 
As Congress heads back to Washington to finish up its stupidly entitled “lame-duck” session this week, Lieberman explained the two most important items would be dealing with the Bush-era tax cuts, lest everybody’s taxes go up come January 1, and reaching an agreement about appropriating funds for the government to ensure it does not close down.
 
Lieberman is also dedicated to repealing the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell rule on homosexuality, which he voted against in 1993, when it was first put into effect. “To me, you judge people in the military not by their race, or nationality, or religion, or gender, or sexual orientation, but by what kind of soldiers they are,” he said.
 
Since 1993, Lieberman said that approximately 13,000 soldiers have been kicked out of the military simply because they were gay, which is more than just a loss of talent. “I saw one estimate that said we spend probably $500 million training those people over the years,” he added.
 
The 60-plus votes needed in the Senate to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell are there, Lieberman insisted. “The question is whether this gets boxed up in the classic sort of senate process gridlock, and we run out of time,” he said.
 
In a few short weeks, Richard Blumenthal will fill the Connecticut Senate seat long occupied by the retiring Chris Dodd, who Lieberman claims he will miss, even though the two had “our moment in 2006,” also known as Dodd betraying Lieberman by supporting the Democrat Ned Lamont for Lieberman’s Senate seat that year, when he ran—and won—on the Independent ticket instead.
 
“He screwed you, didn’t he, Senator?” Imus said during a break from his morning-long coughing fit. Suddenly afflicted himself, Lieberman replied, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, Don.”
 
-Julie Kanfer