KARL ROVE LOANS HIS BITCH TO JOHN BOEHNER AND THE HOUSE REPUBLICANS TO USE AS THEY WILL-- THE SAD, SAD STORY OF EX-DEMOCRAT JOE LIEBERMAN

There are a lot of terrible things that can be said about Joe Lieberman, probably more than anyone else in the entire U.S. Senate, but no one can say Lieberman doesn't repay debts he owes other politicians. Many people wondered how Lieberman would repay Bush, Cheney and Rove when they decided to signal Republicans to vote for Lieberman after he lost the Democratic primary and decided to run on his own Connecticut For Lieberman Party. Would he finally make it official and join the Republicans? Nah... he's very valuable to the GOP as a mole inside the Democratic caucus and as a fake Dem who runs from TV show to radio show to newspaper interview undercutting Democrats and praising Bush to the heavens.

Today, though, the exact terms of the repayment was spelled out when Raw Story revealed a secret memo House Minority Leader/corporate whore John Boehner sent to all Republican congressmen. The memo, a set of talking points to help Republican legislators respond to questions from the media encourages Republicans to use a quote from Holy Joe to attack Democratic resolutions calling for U.S. redeployment. "The people in Congress, and the public," pontificated Lieberman condescendingly, "were quite right in saying the president's got to come up with a different approach. And he did. It's better than any other plan I've seen because it holds the hope of success. Most of the other plans are effectively just giving up and walking away."

Bush and Cheney bring up Lieberman's support at every opportunity as though use of this pariah in the Democratic Party is supposed to signal bipartisan support for a failed policy rejected by 70% of Americans and a like number of senators. If they hadn't saved his neck in November they'd be reduced from getting Zell Miller out of the insane asylum and using him instead.

In 2000 the Inside the Beltway crowd were still propping Lieberman's already spurious Democratic credentials up, so much so they he faced no primary opponent. He ran against Republican Phil Giordano who spent just over a million dollars to win a third of the vote (448,077, or 34% to be exact). Lieberman spent nearly $4,000,000-- simultaneously running for the vice presidency-- and garnered 828,902 votes (63%). This year, after losing the Democratic nomination to an anti-war good government type with massive grassroots support, Ned Lamont, Lieberman was forced to spend over $20,000,000 to save his seat in the general election. Lamont brought it 448,077 votes and the official Republican brought in 109,329 votes, 340,000 less than Giordano had. Where did those 340,000 Republican votes go? Lieberman's 563,725 votes were overwhelmingly cast by Republicans.
Rove made sure that Schlessinger's campaign was cash-starved and the official Republican had only $221,019 with which to get his message out. Most Republican voters just assumed Lieberman was their candidate. And he was. And now he's Rove's bitch.