Nobody Knows The Troubles I've Seen

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with my oeuvre, about a year and a half ago I was involved in a minor controversy involving one of my lesser works.

At the time Joe Lieberman, the primary subject of the piece, opined:

"This is one of the most disgusting and hurtful images that has been used in American history, it's deeply offensive to people of all colors, and it has absolutely no place in the political arena today."

Well! Certainly not a whole lot of ambiguity there, and being that the work didn't cast him in the most favorable light, on the whole an understandable response.

Of course, the fact that he was leafleting black churches with race-baiting flyers in a senatorial nomination race which he eventually lost got left behind in all the excitement, but I digress.

Let's move forward a bit, to Halloween of last year.

Julie Myers, niece of retired Gen. Richard Myers, and an assistant secretary of homeland security recess appointee tasked with heading up the nation's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, is part of a 3-judge panel grading employee costumes for a contest at the staff party, and who does she give the prize to?

A white guy in blackface. Wearing a fake rasta wig, and a striped prison suit.

Class, with a capital K.

Which was then compounded by the inept way that such an egregious bit of racist tomfoolery on the nation's dime was handled for the public's benefit...Lying about the status of the pictures taken during the event, claiming the photos were 'discarded' only to have them resurface after an FOIA request, feigning a lack of awareness that the employee with the costume in question was at work in the same full costume all day without reprimand, pretending that she didn't know the partygoer was wearing makeup, "Shocked...shocked and horrified"...The usual pantheon of bullshit trotted out by the half-bright when pinned in the blinding spotlight of their own revealed chicanery.

And what did Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security committee that allowed Bush's recess appointment of Myers to head up ICE, have to say about these sordid goings-on?

"Senator Lieberman regrets her lapse in judgment regarding the Halloween incident," spokeswoman Leslie Phillips said. "He is inclined to support her nomination, given the committee's review of her entire record, the fact that the union representing 7000 ICE employees supports her and her year's experience in office."

'Regrets her lapse in judgement'...?

Is that the same 'regret in one's lapse in judgement' that the state of Connecticut apparently feels about your return to senatorhood, Joe?

Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent who was his party's 2000 vice presidential nominee, is now viewed unfavorably by two of every three Connecticut Democrats polled during the Super Tuesday presidential primaries, according to exit poll data.

Putz.