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Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Lieberman resigns from Senate; cites “blogswell of outrage”

Washington, DC (MB)-- Shocking political observers across the nation, Joseph Lieberman (D in name only- CT) resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate yesterday.  “I am deeply saddened by the blogosphere’s reaction to my remarks in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Friday,” Lieberman said in a prepared statement.  “I have long looked upon blogs as a vital resource in our fair nation, challenging our official media from a wide variety of political positions and giving voice to ordinary American citizens in every walk of life.  I know that if I have lost the support of bloggers, I have lost the support of the people.  I have therefore decided not to serve out my term of office between now and 2006.  To do so under these circumstances, I feel, would make a mockery of democracy itself.  I thank the good people of Connecticut for allowing me to serve as their representative for these past sixteen years, and I look forward, as I remarked in my October 2000 debate with Dick Cheney, to rejoining the private sector.”

Spokesmen for Lieberman reported that the Senator was overcome by what he called “a blogswell of outrage.” “Ordinarily, Senator Lieberman does not approve of trendy neologisms like ‘blogswell,’” a staffer remarked yesterday.  “He believes strongly that they erode the moral fiber of our language.  But this is an exception.  The volume and the cogency of bloggers’ protests concerning his remarks to Secretary Rumsfeld were simply overwhelmingñ so much so that they’ve simply swept him out of office.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Sources close to Lieberman pointed specifically to remarks by Washington-based reporter Joshua Micah Marshall, as well as to the website of an obscure literature professor in central Pennsylvania.  “Apparently this guy had an ordinary little blog that got about seven or eight hundred visitors a day,” one aide said, “and then he puts up this thing on Lieberman, and before he knows it, he has something like ten thousand hits in twelve hours.  For the Senator, I think that was the tipping pointñ we took one look at the traffic stats at michaelberube.com and we knew it was time to throw in the towel.”

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FROM THE MAILBAG:  Reader Arlene writes in to remind me that one of Lieberman’s moral initiatives-- in which he teamed up with Indiana Republican Dan Coats-- involved writing to then-Secretary of Education Richard Riley (in 1998) to protest the Department of Education’s provision of closed captioning for the Jerry Springer show.  That’s our Joe-- when it comes to systemic human rights atrocities in Abu Ghraib, he’s careful to weigh them against unrelated atrocities committed by other Arabs.  But he stands firm against any expenditure of federal funds that would give hearing-impaired people access to the moral depradations of Jerry Springer.

Posted by Michael on 05/11 at 02:59 AM
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