Is it possible that Holy Joe and the Gerstein Thing have outsmarted themselves by allowing Dem voters to see the GOP-loving opportunist Joe is?

Man, I'm jived. I've already added two comments to Howie's post below, and I still can't let it go. This is, I guess, the blogospheric equivalent of jumping up and down shouting.

It's not Howie's original post, on the Lieberman Shrinkage, that's got me so worked up. It's the news he added as an "update": that His Holiness has now crossed the line and is scheduled to be campaigning today at the Groton submarine base in the company of GOP Rep. Rob Simmons, holder of one of the three Connecticut seats that the Democrats need to win to wrest control of the House from "Planet Denny" Hastert and his cohorts (and also, it turns out, with up-for-election GOP Gov. Jodi Rell).

I assume this is going to be covered with the claim that it's not an endorsement but a show of support for the submarine base, which Holy Joe boasts of having saved from extinction more or less singlehandedly.

But if His Joeness has truly crossed the line and is supporting Republican candidates from his state, then this has to be the end of him. It has to be turned into his political death warrant. Any Democrat who has any contact with him except to spit should be considered unclean.

Of course the Joe-calculation is that there's no price to be paid for supporting Rell's shoe-in reelection bid, but as long as he keeps claiming--so incomprehensibly--to be a Democrat (what do you suppose that means to him?), then he should be crucified for it as well. But contributing to the retention of those GOP House seats? Is there any Democrat--hell, any U.S. political observer--who doesn't know the significance of those seats to the future of the country?

I think maybe the Gerstein Thing has outsmarted Itself--not that that's necessarily such a monumental feat. Since Its boss, the Joe-mentum Man, doesn't give a damn about anything except saving his own hide, and the Gerstein Thing doesn't give a damn about anything except licking the private parts of Its boss, they may have failed to calculate the cost of showing their true colors so publicly.

Sure, they want all those Republican votes, and they should have them. Republicans should be voting for Joe--provided, that is, that they're not squeamish about the considerable depth of his personal dishonesty and disloyalty. (How squeamish they should be is not for me to say, of course.) But the more openly he courts those Republican votes, the harder it is to maintain his Good Old Joe act for his loyal suckers . . . er, constituents.

Holy Joe is just an amazingly good actor, and he's preternaturally good at talking the talk of this progressively oriented but above-the-partisan-fray sage he pretends to be. It's one of the great shams in American political history. Why, doesn't he have the Washington Post editorial board hornswoggled into insisting that what this country needs is more pols like him?

I'd say that three quarters of the Connecticut voters planning to vote for him think that that Mythical Joe is who they're voting for. And that's where the risk lies in having the curtain pulled on the Joe of Oz. If any number of those voters he's been hoodwinking all these years see what's really behind the curtain, it's curtains for Joe.

Certainly the heat level has just been raised on Lieberloving Dems who have continued to support the sanctimonious twerp. If the Democrats--actual Democrats, that is--handle this right, they can begin cutting him off from any outside political support other than from his real allies on the Far Right. And if he starts looking like a loser, his corportate patrons are going to start having second thoughts about pouring money into a losing campaign, however much they love their bitch. He's certainly of no use to them as a former senator.