Liberals are so incensed at Connecticut Senator Joe Liberman's refusal to vote for ObamaCare, that they have taken to attacking his wife, who works for a prominent breast cancer organization. Their ad hominem assaults and wild speculation about the Senator's supposedly evil motives reveal their hypocrisy when it comes to political centrists, and their desperation concerning health care legislation.
At Huffington Post, FireDogLake founder and breast cancer survivor Jane Hamsher revealed that her request to the Susan G. Komen foundation that money raised to find a cure not be used to pay Mrs. Lieberman's salary went unheeded. Hamsher went on to accuse the Lieberman couple of conspiring to sink health care reform in order to line their own pockets.
Hamsher accuses Mrs. Lieberman using "her association with her husband the Senator ... in order to secure these lucrative positions and advance the interests of her clients" at a lobbying firm for which she is a consultant. This contention, Hamsher claims, is "unquestionable," though she offers no evidence to support the accusation, other than speculation about the couple's income.
Hamsher accuses Sen. Lieberman of working against the interests of the Komen foundation, which actively works to find a cure for breast cancer, by voting against ObamaCare. Though she provides some statistics about cost, she neglects to mention the one critical fact that is indispensable to the debate: the United States has the best survival rate for breast cancer patients 5 years after treatment of any country worldwide. So overhauling our nation's health care system would seem contrary to the interests of breast cancer patients--and those seeking a cure.
Lieberman is a maverick in the true--if cliche-ridden--sense of the term. He bucked his own party before the 2006 midterms, and he's doing so again now. When a Jim Jeffords or an Arlen Specter does so, liberals are quick to label him as a courageous centrist. Jeffords's departure from the GOP spurred liberals to paint the party as too conservative. Specter was portrayed as an "alternative candidate to the far-right fringe" of the GOP when he defected.
But when Joe Lieberman bucks his party in a potential deathblow to ObamaCare, he must have some nefarious ulterior motive. Could his move be a sign to the Democrats that they should tack to the center? No, it's a sign that the (shudder) lobbyists are polluting the process, the lefty meme goes.
After their collective inability to convince Sen. Lieberman to change his mind on the Medicare buy-in, the left has apparently trained its sights on the Senator's wife. In an attempt to discredit the Liebermans, Hamsher tells an entertaining tale without providing many facts to back it up, and, relying on pure speculation, links those facts together into some grand conspiracy on the parts of the Senator and his wife.
Meanwhile, a Daily Kos blogger today called for Mrs. Lieberman to be fired from the board of the Komen foundation for purely political reasons. In doing so, the blogger simultaneously showed a stunning indifference towards the suffering of women with the cancer, and demeaned women by tying their professional lives to their husbands'.
"It's grotesque, unseemly and sadly 'uniquely American', that the wife of the man who is working overtime to kill healthcare, is an "ambassador" for the Komen Foundation," wrote Kos blogger nyceve. The post included a petition to remove Mrs. Lieberman from her post as "global ambassador".
Obviously the foundation believes that Mrs. Lieberman supports its objectives better than any other individual. If that weren't the case, she wouldn't hold the post. So her removal, by the organization's own standards, would degrade the services the Komen foundation provides. The Kos blogger implies that Sen. Lieberman's political stances should determine his wife's professional role. Does it get more anti-woman than this?
Though the left, Hamsher and nyceve among them, try to attack the Senator on the supposed contradictions in his objectives and the Komen foundation's, the fact remains that when it comes to breast cancer survival--and Hamsher is a living testimony to this--the United States truly has the best health care system in the world. Preserving that system--preventing it from being dominated by an unaccountable federal government--is completely consistent with the goals of the Komen foundation.
How would Mrs. Lieberman reconcile her assuredly firm commitment to preventing breast cancer with, say, federal bodies that recommend fewer mammograms for women? The federal task force that made such a recommendation last month sparked anger from many organizations that view mammograms as essential tools in breast cancer prevention. Mrs. Lieberman is surely skeptical of a health care system in which the federal government could deny potentially lifesaving treaments such as mammograms in order to cut health care costs.
The facts demonstrate no contradiction between Mrs. Lieberman's role in the Komen foundation and her husband's stance on health care reform. But the left, determined to attack the Senator, has gone so far as to question the integrity and honesty of his wife, an ardent advocate of breast cancer awareness and the search for a cure. These senseless and demeaning attacks only make the left look desperate.
