Last year at this time, I repeatedly shook my head about what I viewed was a misguided primary challenge to Joe Lieberman. Don't get me wrong. I had no affinity for the sanctimonious prick who snuggles with Sean Hannity, but I didn't buy the rhetoric that Lieberman was a cancer within the Democratic Party who needed to be destroyed...particularly if it meant jeopardizing the coalition of voters that the Dems needed to take back Congress last fall. Anyways, my mea culpa is overdue.....
....as was painfully obvious while watching his appalling performance on "Face the Nation" this morning, recklessly calling for pre-emptive military action against Iran despite the mess in the nation next door which Lieberman refuses to admit is even a problem. This guy is nuts...and with every baby step he takes towards abandoning the Democratic Party, I become more convinced he's every bit the serpent that his harshest critics tried to convince of last year.
Last summer, while still critical of Lieberman, I did not see Ned Lamont as a worthy enough alternative to risk the PR disaster that I expected would ensue if the media-adulated Lieberman was to be snuffed out by Lamont, a guy who I figured would be spun as a raging left-wing lunatic. Correspondingly, I feared Democratic voters would be tagged extremists demanding nothing less than ideological purity if a high-profile Senator like Lieberman was given his walking papers. I thought this narrative would cannibalize much of the rest of the election season and force moderate Democrats in races such as Missouri and Virginia to choose sides.
Obviously, I was overzealous in these fears. I was right about Lamont being a hapless candidate at the end of the day, but knowing what I know now, I would have gotten behind Lamont's candidacy from the get-go no matter the consequences. It's painfully obvious at this point that every day Joe Lieberman is in the Democratic Party caucus (however nominally) is a day that the Democratic Party starts out with one strike against it.