Joe McCarthy Lieberman?

The Hartford Advocate, 20 December 2001, pg. 9

Sen. Joe Lieberman has been criticized by the leftists in the past for supporting school vouchers and leading a censorship campaign on video games, but nothing ticks off the leftists more than a little MaCarthyism.

When Republican Se. Joseph McCarthy stood in front of Congress, Feb. 20, 1950, and for six hours rifled through old State Department dosssiers claiming he had proof that 81 State Department employees were Communists, it guaranteed for all time that he would be remembered as an enemy of the time-honored American tradition of free speech and free association. Similarly Lieberman, who sits on the advistory board of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which released a report that criticizes universities for evidence of anti-Americanism during the current war in Afghanistan, may be enhancing his chaces of being remembered by posterity as the Censorship King.

Lieberman's spokesperson Dan Gerstein, says, He was not consulted about the report... He was upset because they never shared the conclusions. Sitting on the advistory board is more of an honorary position, Gerstein said. That's odd, because the American Council claims that Mr. Lieberman serves on its National Council, a body that is ACTA's governing board...made up of distinguished and dedicated individuals from business, government and academis, alongside former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm.

That's a bit embarrassing. The ACTA report cites 117 remarks and comments made by students and educators that ACTA considers un-American, like the comments made by Doug Bennett, the president of Wesleyan University in Middletown. In an open letter, Mr. Bennet wrote of American society and its relation to the larger world, saying, disparities and injusticies are there, all the more intolerable becasue they are embedded in some of the most fundamental aspects of our society and th world we live in. Addressing these disparities and injustices will not be possible if the world community continues to block its own progress and destroy its people in conflicts generated by prejudice and hatred.

Can Lieberman really believe these remarks and others like these made by university students and faculty are un-American?