Apparently fine lies, like fine wine, require time to develop--at least when the fine liar is Holy Joe Lieberman

I followed Howie's suggestion to read Mark Pazniokas's full Hartford Courant account of the awkward timing for Holy Joe Lieberman of the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate that the outlook for U.S. security has worsened drastically since 9/11, that U.S. policies have in fact turned Iraq into a hotbed of terrorism.

The obvious way in which the timing is awkward is that His Holiness already had a campaign speech scheduled for today in which he was going to come out guns blazing in support of his from-day-one support of the idea of invading Iraq, the only problem being some flawed execution by the administration. As we all know, the Democratic candidate for Senator Joe's seat, Ned Lamont, has staked out a very different position on the war.

But for poor Joe the bad timing has another dimension. The stories making public the N.I.E. judgment appeared in Sunday's New York Times and Washington Post. Meaning that:

The disclosure of the National Intelligence Estimate came at an especially awkward time for Lieberman, who refrained from campaign and official duties from sunset Friday to sunset Sunday in observance of Rosh Hashana.

"I haven't had a chance to talk to him. I don't know how we are going to treat this in the speech, because it is new," said the Gerstein Thing, Lieberman's communication director.

Presumably, therefore, word starts circulating on Saturday that the lid on the N.I.E. is about to blow, but the senator apparently refrains from lying, cheating and stealing--or at any rate conniving to lie, cheat and steal--on the Jewish High Holy Days. (God, it appears, doesn't care how much lying, cheating and stealing His boy Joe does on non-holy days.)

Think of that day-plus lost! All that time when His Holiness and his campaign cronies could have been making up pretty stories to lull Connecticut voters back into insensibility. So the fairy tales told by our Joe today, dating back no farther than sunset yesterday and being thus less than a day old, are likely to be crude and immature, not fit for consumption for at least another day.