You Were Never One of Us

The guy who tried to blow up Times Square is a Muslim, but also a US citizen; this has caused some serious cognitive dissonance among conservatives, so to reconcile it, Joe Lieberman proposed a new law allowing the government to strip "Americans" of their citizenship if they're accused of aiding a "Foreign Terrorist Organization".  This way, we can legally whisk these Muslims off to Guantanamo, rather than be forced to pamper them with the luxuries of the Constitution to which we treat our serial rapists and murderers.

Lieberman's pandering to Conservatives is so blatant that he actually has the gall to call it the TEA Act, which is an acronym for Terrorist Expatriation Act.  This is also why he specifies that the terrorist organization be "foreign"; at its root, the law is based around the jingoist idea that these Muslims aren't real Americans. 

And if he didn't limit it to foreigners, the act could be applied to Conservative gun-nut militias, and that would be untenable to the Far-Right because nothing inflames them like threatening to rescind their constitutional rights.  But why wouldn't the word "foreign" apply to people like the Montana Freemen, who claimed they were each their own country?  There's also the Hutaree Militia, who wanted to replace the US Government, and called themselves the "Colonial Christian Republic". 

The logic might sound like a bit of a stretch, but if anything's understood about the mind-frames of these crazy white-person militias, its that they're paranoid as hell about the slippery-slope and the erosion of Constitutional rights.  Lieberman is trying to kiss the asses of the Far-Right, but his grandstanding just might turn some of them into enemy combatants.  And I know it's a little insane, to pick nits out of a huge pile of shit, but hey, Lieberman brings out the nut-job in me.

Lieberman embracing Conservatism, taking it too far, and far too literally.  It's hard to believe we ever considered him one of us.