It's about 1,836 confirmed dead, 705 missing, and the ten of thousands still displaced years after Hurricane Katrina.
It's about the ethnic cleansing of one of America's oldest cities, the purging by gross negligence of one of our cultural treasures.
That's why I'm still angry at Sen. Joe Lieberman for his dismal record under the 109th and 110th Congresses, and why I am still fuming that he retained his chairmanship of the Governmental Affairs Committee under the next session of Congress.
There are critics who say that Lieberman is a problem with which the people of Connecticut will deal in the future when his seat is up for re-election.
Not so, or at least Lieberman's seat in the Senate is a different issue, and one I do truly hope that Connecticut's citizens will get right this time.
But the chairmanship of the Governmental Affairs committee is a matter for the entire nation to address, on behalf of the 1,836 dead and 705 missing and many more disenfranchised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The dead and missing have lost their voice, and we owe it to them to replace him with an effective chair who will not only investigate why the levees failed, why the federal government responded in advance, during and after the storm so poorly.
And we, the living, owe it to ourselves that a Senate committee chair not fail to do their job ever again.
It's not about revenge or retribution, as others have labeled the anger many progressives feel about Lieberman. It's about doing the job one's agreed to do, or getting replaced for failing it. It's about getting to the bottom of unnecessary loss of American lives, and making sure that the miseries that felled them do not happen again.
And I'm not going to forget as time goes by that Lieberman has failed those 1,836 and 705 every day he does not conduct a hearing on their behalf. Nor am I going to forget that he fails every damned day he does not conduct a hearing on our behalf to prevent such losses from happening again.
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