Even now, do the Dems who allowed Holy Joe to hold onto his Senate seat--let alone the ones who endorsed him--understand what they did?

Keith Olbermann had Arianna Huffington on Countdown last night to talk about Joe Lieberman's peculiar brand of "Democrat"-ness, and Arianna made the excellent point that all those national Democrats who washed their hands of the Connecticut Senate race on the ground that the seat was "safely Democratic" either way are discovering that, boy, did they have their heads up their smelly behinds. Okay, that's not quite how she put it. She might have said something more along the lines of "learning how wrong they were."

But I wonder. Even now that Holy Joe is having the time of his pathetic life squeezing the nuts of the razor-thin Senate Democratic majority, of which he is nominally a member, do the doodyhead Democratic enablers who allowed him to undo the result of his state's Democratic Senate primary really undestand what they did? Do you think? Really?

And I understood Arianna to be talking about Democrats who remained neutral after the primary, and turned their attention to other Senate races--ones that, unlike Connecticut's, would affect which party controlled the Senate in the 110th Congress. This leaves the geniuses who, presumably out of "loyalty" (a quality Holy Joe reserves for people who have a compelling answer to the one question that really and truly interests him, "What's in it for me?"), actually endorsed the putrid scumbag, and even campaigned for him--in a general election in which we can now say that every word that came out of his mouth was a lie.

At least when the old grifter was suckering his old Democratic supporters into voting for him. His new Republican supporters he didn't so much lie to as wink at. Of course now that His Holiness is one of the last elected officials standing squarely behind Chimpy the War President, it's likely that he in fact stands well to the right of even his new Republican "base."

Keith asked Arianna why she thinks our Joe doesn't just declare himself the Republican he gives every evidence of being. Arianna thought that, more than anything, it's the embarrassment factor--the massive videotape record from the campaign of His Holiness swearing up and down that he's really and truly a Democrat and would remain a Democrat.

It goes without saying, I assume, that this embarrassment at making a nonstop publc liar of himself will fade into insignificance the very second that circumstances provide him with a Republican-tilting answer to the Holy Joe Eternal Question, what's in it for me?


ON THE SUBJECT OF HOLY JOE . . .

. . . and in particular the cheesy piety of his self-proclaimed bipartisan sainthood, Connecticut Democratic pol-turned-Hartford Courant columnist Bill Curry has a fine HuffPost piece, "Bipartisanship, or Lieberman Unshackled," in which he points out:

Before the election Lieberman told a war weary public "I hear you" and lashed out at Ned Lamont for saying he, Lieberman, wanted to stay the course. After the election Lieberman went back to scolding Bush's critics for weakening America. Now he's for escalation, which is 'stay the course' on steroids. If he'd whispered the word escalation prior to Election Day, he'd be out of a job.

Near the end of the election, Lieberman gazed into a camera and said, "No one wants to end the war more than I do." Now every Democrat in town wants to end it more than he does. He's again Bush's point man. Their strategy would have us fighting another decade or more. . . .


It's worth noting that against a total neophyte and a professional card counter, Lieberman got under 50 percent. He pledged that if elected, he'd stay a Democrat. A third of Democrats voted for him. Except for the pledge, many would have gone to Lamont. Democratic senators might have done the same. Lieberman might have lost.

After the election, he told reporters he'd "organize with Democrats" because "my word is my bond" and anyway he had to "for seniority." When asked, he couldn't cite another reason to remain a Democrat. Then on "Meet the Press," he said he might switch parties, though he wouldn't do it "over a single vote." He said he felt "unshackled. . . .


Using your party as a backboard for your political bank shots is a dangerous game. Democratic senators who stood to applaud Lieberman at a post election caucus were like volcano worshipers. They know he's mad and that if he erupts now, they're toast. But the 2008 Senate field tilts Democratic. With a little margin, they'd need him less. If he doesn't rethink his 'mandate' he could end up like Bush. One still assumes he doesn't want that.

AND SPEAKING OF DLC SLUDGE . . .

Also on HuffPost, David Sirota ("The Place Where Logic Does Not Exist") sticks a sharp pin in pathetic but still pompous DLC gasbag Will Marshall, who--

spent the last decade telling Democrats how they should go about supporting a war in Iraq and how that would be a good political and national security strategy. Now, I kid you not, he is out there with a perfectly straight face proposing "strategy" for Democrats to go about opposing the war in Iraq (you will notice most of his article is telling them how to look like they oppose the war without actually opposing the war). . . .


Really--logic would dictate think that after what we've been through in the last four years a bloviator like Marshall--who is literally paid ONLY to be an "expert" and a "strategist"--would be busy looking for work in a different profession, because he had clearly been so intellectually unable to actually perform the most basic functions of an actual "expert" or a "strategist." Similarly, you would think organizations like the DLC would be shutting down and magazines like the New Republic would be boarded up, too embarrassed to continue spewing their drivel.

But sadly, logic is not in abundance in our nation's capital these days. That's exactly why we got into the Iraq War in the first place, and it is exactly why our country faces such enormous challenges today: because our government is seated in the place where logic no longer exists.