Updated 11/23/08: On the term “man crush”. This phrase gained some popularity in 2005. And guess who the example was? (Read this article – it’s about Lieberman and…. BUSH.)
More on Joe Lieberman: I’m especially glad I wrote what I did last week (below) now that the good senator couldn’t bring himself to say the simple words “I’m sorry” about his attacks against Obama when he was on Meet the Press today. There’s a big difference between saying “I regret what I said” and an apology. Not to rehash my previous column though I wonder if Joe is still trying to ingratiate himself to his close friend John. I find Lieberman’s unwillingness to answer a straight question more that irritating. Tom Brokaw asked him specifically if he was sorry. This was his answer: “I do regret, as I said to the caucus and afterward publicly, there are some things I said during the heat of the campaign that I should have said more clearly and some things I shouldn’t have said at all. They stressed disapproval for some of the things I said. I accept that. That was the spirit of reconciliation. Now we move on together to get the nation’s business done. We don’t have the luxury of looking back. He is the winner, he is the President-elect.” I’d never have never gotten away with that in lieu of an “I’m sorry” with my parents and I can’t imagine Joe would have. Sam Stein wrote pretty much my thoughts on Huffington Post today.
Read what Hartford Courant columnist Colin McEnroe has to say about Joe Lieberman in his blog:
If Joe Lieberman Couldn’t Pry McCain Away From His Wife …
February 21, 2008 6:02 PMExcellent point by Paz. Joe Lieberman who has spent years in the grip of a tragic man-crush on John McCain and who will, as we know, mack on Republicans at the slightest encouragement, would certainly be the first to know if there was any way to get John to forsake Cindy and start feelin’ on his booty. So he can promise you that this is all about riding around on corporate jets and not about sexual monkey business. Phew!
Joe Lieberman, who used his student and marriage deferments to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, had a serious case of hero worship with his friend, the macho, crude, blustering former POW John McCain. I think Barack Obama, who came out of the womb self-confident and ready to conquer the world, understands human nature very well. That’s one of the reasons he’s willing to forgive him. He knows that a man married to an orthodox Jew named Hadassah (the name of the Women’s Zionist Organization of America) has to have something wrong with him to pal around with a man who jokes about having his own wife show her tits at a biker rally.
After all, Joe Lieberman was more indignant and expressed more personal moral outrage at Bill Clinton for his dalliance with Monika Lewenski than any other prominent Democrat.
There has to be a psychological reason, a met need, for his attraction to John McCain, a man so different than himself in such an important way.
While we know that it isn’t literally true that “throughout his early childhood, he was teased mercilessly by the other children for looking like a turtle, and as he grew into adulthood he was grateful that he stopped looking like a turtle and looked more like a mature tortoise” (from a satirical Uncyclopedia) I expect Joe Lieberman was like the nerdy shy Jewish kids I knew growing up.
He heeded his parents advice to study hard so he could go to a good college, become successful and make his parents proud.
In fact, he not only was the first in his family to go to college, he went to Yale where he got both his undergraduate and law degrees.
I haven’t been able to find much about Lieberman’s childhood online. Thus most of this is speculation.
Lieberman’s first wife, Betty, was a psychiatric social worker who he met when they were both summer student interns at the congressional office of Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). Since this is my own profession I can say that most of my female counterparts are wild and crazy sex machines.
Whether she was too much for Joe remains to be seen since the only reason he’s given for their divorce is that he was more religious than she was.
Maybe he couldn’t satisfy her sexual appetite. Or maybe he wasn’t all that interested. We’ll probably never know.
Most politician’s biographies mention whether they were active in sports in high school and college. I could find no such mention searching the Internet for information on Lieberman.
This seems to support my speculation that he was a bit of a nerd.
Obviously Lieberman came into his own as an adult and like many politicians basked in the limelight.
But what about his need to feel good about himself as a man, I mean a “real man”?
Real men, of course, have never met a war they don’t like.
George W. Bush, chicken hawk that he was, still effected the swagger, and got off on unleashing America’s military arsenal against non-existent hidden Iraq weapons of mass destruction, and Bush once actually could fly a jet plane.
This would explain why he apparently enjoyed the famous, or infamous depending on your point of view, Bush kiss so much that he denied it ever happened despite video evidence to the contrary.
Following his 2005 State of the Union address, President Bush, while shaking lawmakers’ hands, abruptly grasped Lieberman’s head in both hands and leaned in close to his cheek. The incident became known as “the kiss.” At first, Lieberman’s staff humorously referred to the embrace as “some kind of Yale thing.” However, political backlash arose among Ned Lamont supporters and other critics of Lieberman. Lamont backers used the incident in a campaign button: “The Kiss: Too Close for Comfort” and a large papier-mache sculpture that followed Lieberman on the campaign trail. Lieberman has since denied the kiss took place. “I don’t think he kissed me, he leaned over and gave me a hug and said ‘thank you for being a patriotic American,’ ” Lieberman told Time Magazine. After Lieberman’s defeat in the Democratic primary, an editorial claimed Bush’s sign of affinity cost him the nomination, and referred to the incident as “the kiss of death,”[citation needed] but Lieberman would still go on to win the seat as an independent.(Wikipedia)
Me thinks Lieberman protested too much because he’s repressed the feeling that the Bush lips on his check made him feel “bigger”, probably figuratively, perhaps literally.
I just think he identifies with a certain type of posturing swaggering man because he envied boys like that when he was a child.
Maybe Barack Obama can teach him how to shoot hoops and little Joe will learn what a real “real man” is.
Biographical information in this column came from Wikipedia.
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