I used to have mixed feelings about Joe Lieberman. He wasn’t the most electric of presidential candidates and sometimes he tended to the sanctimonious – the Holy Joe thing. But I am increasingly becoming convinced he is the indispensable man in the US Congress, indeed in the entirety of our government, a welcome whiff of integrity in a morass of group think, self interest and outright dishonesty.

Perhaps it’s his independent status, but where freedom of thought is called for, usually it’s Lieberman who is the first to step forward. Most recently we have seen this in two key areas – healthcare and the controversy surrounding the actions of Nidal Hasan.

Regarding healthcare, Joe Lieberman holds within his hands the ability to block a piece of legislation that could be disastrous for our country, a bill constructed out of the most blatant partisan know-nothingism. Of course, his enemies will cry that his opposition stems from the presence of insurance companies in his state, but I think we all know that Joe Lieberman is well beyond that at this point – and not just because he is 67 but because of who he is. From Bloomberg:

Donald W. Greenberg, associate professor of politics at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, said Democrats need Lieberman a lot more than he needs them.

“He feels now that he’s secure,” Greenberg said in an interview. “His history has always been as a social liberal. There are lots of issues where he might bolt the party, but you wouldn’t think this is the one. I do think he believes sincerely that this is very dangerous for the economy.”

Believes sincerely? How’s that for a member of the US Congress, moving about in the world of the Murthas, Rangels, Reids and Dodds, who probably don’t believe sincerely that they put on their own socks in the morning?

And who was the first up to call for a congressional investigation of the Ft. Hood disaster? Joe Lieberman, of course. Were we surprised? Again of course, not. Not any longer. Lieberman knew immediately that the most important problem to emerge from that tragedy was to understand as completely as we could why a man like Dr. Hasan could have been allowed to serve in our military.

When you think about it, it’s amazing how much we need Joe Lieberman at this point in our history.

If this short piece sounds like a campaign speech, well, in a way it is. Coming back to my lede, I mentioned how I used to have mixed feelings about Joe Lieberman, how he ran a flat Presidential campaign. (He wasn’t particularly scintillating as a Vice-Presidential candidate either.) But maybe that’s the point. Maybe what’s called for in a great political campaigner – the ability to lie and exaggerate to attract the masses – is precisely what is NOT called for in a great political leader – honesty and courage.

I will ask you one final question. Who would you rather see in the presidency today at this time of financial and international crisis, Barack Obama or Joe Lieberman?

Lionel Chetwynd and I – two guys who have been voting in the Oscars since the early Paleolithic Age or, in my case, 1983 (whichever came first) – discuss whether the Oscars are corrupt in the new Poliwood. Without giving it away, we compare the OScars to other awards and elections on the corruption scale. Can our Oscar votes be bought? Well, I can’t speak for Lionel, but for myself – make me an offer. [I hope you're kidding.-ed. That's for me to know and you to find out.] But seriously, folks, on the show I do admit that I was bought in the past… well, almost… by the French. They gave the best parties. Sadly, no more. The rules have tightened. Lionel and I go over those rules on the show, just so you know what to expect as the annual carnival begins. You can watch the show here.

As readers know I am “longtime Californ’” and, yes, I have bumped into Jerry Brown personally on a few occasions and I have to say Jerry is one of the more interesting politicians I have ever met. He sometimes thinks out of the box and has interests that extend well beyond the political sphere.

But, Jekyll and Hyde, he can also be the most traditional sort of hack pol imaginable and right now – at the very moment he is aiming to reclaim the governorship of the Golden State – he seems to have brought a situation upon himself that could make the famed Medfly Scandal seem like so many gnats at a horse show.

He has made the mistake of tangling – consciously or not – with Andrew Breitbart. Worse yet – over ACORN.

What we know so far: Some bozo named David Lagstein – ACORN’s chief organizer for the San Diego area – made the dim bulb mistake of speaking out loud to a group of Democrats at the very public venue of a Coco’s Restaurant in El Cajon. Someone recorded his statements, including such doozies as Brown is a “political animal” and will find the fault to be “with the people that did the video — not ACORN.” And so forth. For those who don’t know, Brown, as California Attorney General, is supposedly conducting an investigation of ACORN prompted by the videos, which originally appeared on Breitbart’s site. These latest recordings are also available on Big Government. I encourage you to listen, if you haven’t.

On top of this, there is a complication for Brown in the attempt to “kill the messengers” (i. e. blame the clandestine videographers) for the bad news here. One of the Attorney General’s own spokesmen has just been accused himself of secretly recording interviews with journalists. But no matter. Even if this were not true, the attempt to blame the videographers is pathetic, since they didn’t for a second make up the horrifying revelations about ACORN available on who knows how many videos about the organization. ACORN and its personnel did that to themselves. Apparently the Attorney General was already questioned about this growing scandal on the radio, but avoided answering. (I didn’t hear it.)

So, hello Jerry Brown. History knocks. Who are you? Are you a man of courage able to think out of the box? Or a party hack? Surely, you of all people understand that organizations like ACORN, even leaving aside their potential enabling of child prostitution, are far more destructive than helpful to the people they are supposed to aid. They are part of the problem, as we used to say, not part of the solution. What are you going to do, Jerry? Who are you going to be? The citizens (and voters) of California are waiting.

Word has been leaked by the Washington Post’s insidery The Fix that White House communications director Anita Dunn will be the first Obama senior staffer to “resign” at the end of this month. I guess they don’t count czars as senior staff, but no matter. What’s interesting in The Fix’s rather lengthy report is that there is no mention of the red elephant in the room – ‘Papa Mao Tse-Tung,” as we used to say in the sixties. No, The Fix’s Chris Cillizza dances around, seemingly linking Dunn’s downfall, if that’s what it is, to her leading the administration’s charge against Fox News (taking one for the team, I suppose). He doesn’t mention Dunn’s notorious remarks at a high school graduation, when she cited Mao and Mother Teresa as her mentors.

Of course there’s this, so who knows?

The passing of the baton from Dunn to Pfeiffer had long been expected within White House circles as she had made clear when she took the job that the “interim” in her title was meant to be taken literally.

Hard to tell if that’s real or spin or, more probably, both, but Cillizza’s report also contains this eye-opening tidbit:

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and former Illinois Congressman, has made clear he would like to return to elected office at some point in the not-too-distant future and, if past presidencies are any guide there will be some further turnover in the senior staff over the next year or so.

Rahm Emanuel? The man who exhorted his colleagues never to miss the opportunities offered by a good crisis? Is he the next to go? Have we begun the night of the long Obama knives?

It’s Oscar season again – long and drawn out as that may be – at least Oscar season for Lionel Chetwynd and me because we are starting to receive the annual screeners. Soon it will be like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and we will have enough of these leftover DVDs to provide coasters for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding II.” [Are they making that?-ed. Not to my knowledge]

Anyway Lionel and I will review those of interest to us on Poliwood – the first being Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works,” starring Larry David as Woody – the aging playing the aged. Anyway, Woody’s fantasy that you can be attractive to twenty-year olds at seventy goes on. Lionel and I have fun with it here. And we have some other comments about DAvid and Allen as well. Speaking of the aged, old Poliwoods are here.

Well, it might be political correctness with a dollop of bureaucratic protectiveness, but whatever the cause ABC’s article today is a blockbuster: Fort Hood Shooter Tried to Contact al Qaeda. There’s more in the ABC piece that takes the Fort Hood mass murders well beyond a you-know-what-happens accident into the realm of malfeasance by the military and/or our intelligence agencies. Sen. Joseph Lieberman is calling for an investigation:

On Sunday, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) called for an investigation into whether the Army missed signs as to whether Hasan was an Islamic extremist.

“If Hasan was showing signs, saying to people that he had become an Islamist extremist, the U.S. Army has to have a zero tolerance,” Lieberman told Fox News Sunday.

Zero minus one, I should think. Meanwhile, what did the CIA know and why didn’t they tell the military of Hasan’s efforts to contact al Qaeda (or did they?):

One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan’s efforts.

CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, have been asked by Congress “to preserve” all documents and intelligence files that relate to Hasan, according to the lawmaker.

Whoa. My post of Friday night is proving more accurate than I would have liked.

The immediate reaction of the mainstream media on learning of the activities of Nidal Malik Hasan was to say that he was crazy. And no doubt that was true. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM IV), could probably place Major Hasan comfortably in several categories.

Of course, the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden and various other mass murderers of recent history. Nevertheless, the attempt was to explain away Hasan’s actions as pathological and thus avoid dealing with, or even – to the degree possible – mentioning the ideology to which his neuroses adhere (hint: it begins with an “I”).

This strategy is a form of what is popularly known as political correctness, which I submit is also a pathology and a quite virulent one – in this case, arguably the cause of death of the thirteen men and women murdered at Fort Hood.

As a reminder, political correctness is derived from the more intellectually respectable doctrine of cultural relativism (it’s sort of CR’s public “happy face”). In essence, cultural relativism holds that an individual’s beliefs and activities should only be understood in terms of his or her own culture. It’s the ultimate version of “who are we to the judge?” If Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to oppress all the women and homosexuals in Iran, it’s their way. If Mao seeks to knock off seventy million of his countrymen, so be it. Let the Chinese decide. We shouldn’t impose our values.

On our increasingly tiny globe, this theory – when spelled out – is nothing short of preposterous. It fairly invites a return to the mass murdering ideologies of the Twentieth Century – Nazism, communism, etc – and opens the door wide for Islamism.

Even so, its “happy face” partner political correctness continues to permeate our culture and our media. And, alas, as we are now painfully aware, it has infected our military – badly. How else to explain that Nidal Hassan was passed through the Army system for years despite making numerous public pronouncements that sounded as if they were ripped from the pages of an al Qaeda training manual?

This sad infection of our military is the most disturbing and self-destructive achievement of political correctness yet. Still, cable television spends hours trying to probe the “motivations” of Hasan, as if a Muslim bumper sticker torn from his car could explain his actions or even (oh, hope) exonerate him. That way we would not have to deal with the ideology behind him and, more importantly, not have to confront our own pathology.

But that pathology of political correctness has now been laid bare before us. More than the two handguns, it was the murder weapon in that room at Fort Hood. Those thirteen innocent people are indeed PC deaths because it was PC that allowed Hasan to be there. The question is, as it is with all emotionally loaded learning, what will we do with this new information?

To begin with, we must explore what attracted us to political correctness in the first place. Several explanations suggest themselves: political expediency, increased power in certain quarters, the desire to be left alone, the desire to be loved, even psychosexual masochism. There are more, I am sure. But they must be ventilated. Nothing can bring back the thirteen who were killed. But the most fitting memorial to them would be that their murders would signal the death knell of political correctness.

In the midst of all the post-election by-play and the battle over healthcare, that even more important battle, the one for the freedom of the Iranian people, rages on. Tomorrow I will be interviewing PJTV’s resident expert Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi on yesterday’s demonstrations but meanwhile have a look at this compendium of demonstrator videos collected off YouTube by CNN. This revolution is by no means over. As usual, Obama has bet on the wrong (in this case the reactionary) side. Of particular note on these videos are the demonstrators calling out to our President “Are you with them or are you with us?” Good question.

The situation in Iran is yet another example of how we live in a world upside down since 9/11 with liberals seemingly less interested in the fate of the freedom demonstrators than conservatives, libertarians and independents. Meanwhile, the mullahs continue their fascist actions. As I used to write on this blog years ago and as the old song goes, “Which side are you on? Which side are you on?”

November 3, 2009, was a great day for the Republican Party with resounding wins in Virginia and, improbably, New Jersey where Bruce Springsteen blared as Chris Christie began his victory speech. (I wonder if Bruce will sue.) But in the midst of the welter of re-upped GOP glory only one year after ignominious defeat, there was one outlier – New York’s Twenty-Third Congressional District.

Now I realize that the surprise loser there, Doug Hoffman, ran as a Conservative, not a Republican. But I submit in this case that was a distinction without a significant difference because virtually all the Republican establishment had lined up behind Hoffman by the day of the election.

So why – in what was clearly a Republican year – did Hoffman lose? Well, there are several reasons and, yes, the Democratic victory was narrow, thinner than the five or so percent that went to withdrawn Republican nominee Scozzafava who herself endorsed the Democratic candidate. Still, the 23rd is a safely Republican, even conservative, district. In a year where the GOP racked up a 20% margin in Virginia and coasted easily in Jersey, a state in which Obama romped in ‘08 by 16%, what was the problem?

Well… I might as well say it… social conservatism. America is a fiscally conservative country – now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification – but not a socially conservative one. No, I don’t mean to say it’s socially liberal. It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets.

Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign, however, tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state – you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.

There is, of course, a message in this for the Republican Party going forward. You can choose to emphasize the social issues or not. Today may show the former is a losing proposition.

Could anybody with an IQ in the proverbial triple digits be surprised how the Iran nuclear weapons talks are playing out? There’s nothing perplexing about it at all, as the mullahs delay any way they can while going about the business of building their atomic arsenal. The only slightly interesting drama is the Russians. My guess is they can’t really decide what to do. On the one hand, a nuclear armed Iranian regime is a great thorn in the side of the hated USA; on the other they know as well as anybody that the mullahs are crazy. Who wants a religious lunatic with an A-bomb on your border?

Interesting conundrum. I suspect the Russians are crazy enough themselves (a majority evidently still love Comrade Stalin) to come down in favor of the mullahs, but we shall see. Or not. Events could take over. It doesn’t seem that anybody has a real plan – anybody that’s talking about it anyway.