Quotes of the day: Choose your John--you can listen to John Edwards on Ned Lamont and the war or to Crazy John Gibson on Holy Joe Lieberman

"I voted for this war. I was wrong. I should not have voted for this war, and I take responsibility for that."
--former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, at the rally outside Yale Medical School supporting Ned Lamont pictured above

"Lieberman's Likely Win Will Be Embarrassing for Democrats"
--headline on a foxnews.com "Big Story" by John "If I'm Not the Dumbest Creature on the Planet, Just Show Me Something Dumber" Gibson (right)

You'd think the jackbooted jackasses at Fox "News," dumb as they are, would be smart enough to realize that they can't be campaigning so openly for Joe "Joe Lieberman Fighting for Joe Lieberman" Lieberman. Ditto the thugs of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and the other hard-right ideologues who are carrying water for their darlin' Joe.

If Connecticut voters finally come to understand who actually supports Senator Joe, the myth of his "centrism" goes kaput, his poll numbers go whoosh! down the toilet, and he can begin planning his new career--alongside his Hadassah--as an openly paid lobbyist for his present corporate whoremasters.

As for John Edwards, I don't mean to suggest that he has satisfied some fraternity hazing ritual by "cleansing" himself of his war vote. I just say that it's a necesssary step to make possible reasonable discussion of what we do next.

Back in the early years of the century, when the gang of warmongering thugs propping up Chimpy the Prez were using their trained stooge Joe Lieberman to help unloose their neoncon psychoses on a horrified world, there were plenty of people warning gumptionless congresscritters that someday they might have to answer for their votes. I remember Howie, for one, doing his share of online shouting.

It's not that those people now need to swear--or unswear--some kind of "oath" in order to be able to get on with their careers. The point is that we really can't get out of Iraq without some useful acknowledgment of how we got in. Since people like George W. Bush and Joe Lieberman still don't seem to grasp any of the many ways in which it was a ghastly blunder, I don't put much stock in their being able to get us out of it.

This isn't the first time Edwards has said, loud and clear, that his vote for the war was wrong. In November, he began an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, setting out how he thought we might get out, like so:

I was wrong.

Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told--and what many of us believed and argued--was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda.

It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake. It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake--the men and women of our armed forces and their families--have performed heroically and paid a dear price.

The world desperately needs moral leadership from America, and the foundation for moral leadership is telling the truth.

While we can't change the past, we need to accept responsibility, because a key part of restoring America's moral leadership is acknowledging when we've made mistakes or been proven wrong--and showing that we have the creativity and guts to make it right.

The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president--and that I was being given by our intelligence community--wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war.

George Bush won't accept responsibility for his mistakes. Along with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he has made horrible mistakes at almost every step: failed diplomacy; not going in with enough troops; not giving our forces the equipment they need; not having a plan for peace.

Because of these failures, Iraq is a mess and has become a far greater threat than it ever was. It is now a haven for terrorists, and our presence there is draining the goodwill our country once enjoyed, diminishing our global standing. It has made fighting the global war against terrorist organizations more difficult, not less. . . .

So, we've got John Gibson, and then we've got John Edwards.

Of course, it's possible that Gibson's support for Senator Joe is based less on the senator's support for the war than on his solid record of social progressivism. Good one, right? The next time you see either our John or our Joe anywhere near anything that smacks of social progressivism, take a picture and shoot it on to Ripley's. Meanwhile, draw inspiration from the battle cry of all good patriotic "centrists":

JOE LIEBERMAN
FIGHTING FOR
JOE LIEBERMAN