I'd have to say that Hurricane Katrina was the tipping point. Bush, to me, was always a guy whose priorities were out of whack. In the 72 hours after the tragedy, he stops first at Trent Lott's house in Mississippi and then says "Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job" as people are dying in the heat waiting for help that didn't come on time. This was a display of unprecendented presidential imcompetance.

Posted at December 26, 2006 12:04 PM in response to Event of the (Two) Year (Cycle)?

Josh, there is one basic incorrect premise to your notes above, and that is this belief that Joe Lieberman is a Democrat.

You may have had an argument before August 8th that Joe Lieberman was a Democrat (albeit a weak one given his undying support for the catastrophe that is Iraq), but in the here and now, Lieberman has LEFT THE PARTY. "Promises" that he'll caucus with Democrats ring rather hollow when the new pollsters and consultants he's hired have worked in the past almost exclusively with Republicans. Add to that the default support from the Republican campaign apparatus, along with the Bill Bennett-like predilections of the actual Republican Senate candidate, and Lieberman is the de facto Republican candidate for US Senate in Connecticut.

This is not a case of Democrats and liberals turning on their own. This is the excision of a malignancy of submission that afflicts not just Lieberman, but also, based on the tepid response of his Democratic "colleagues" in the Senate, the incumbent Democratic leadership in Congress.

Lieberman's predicament isn't the fault of bloggers, consultants or even the voters of Connecticut. The fault with Joe Lieberman's troubles lay with Joe Lieberman. Using the above analogy, Joe Lieberman is a cigarette smoker who develops lung cancer and then blames everyone around him for not getting him to quit smoking. If he wasn't such an insufferable, whiny moralist, I'd almost pity him.

To answer your question, yes, it's gravely important to defeat Lieberman over all other Senate challengers. Even a dyed-in-the-wool crook like Conrad Burns has some level of respect for the primary system. If we let these kind of tantrum campaigns like Lieberman's continue, why hold primary elections at all? I'm most angry at the DSCC and the DLC deciding that it's more important to protect Lieberman's incumbency than to have a TRUE Democratic majority in Congress.

Posted at August 21, 2006 12:03 PM in response to The Lieberman Lamont Debate

I haven't seen it, at least not as clearly as I see Coulter's.

Posted at August 11, 2006 2:42 PM in response to Who Is "Serious" About Terrorism?

If you needed any more proof that Joe Lieberman is now a default Republican, here it is. He's now one clearly visible Adam's apple away from being Ann Coulter.

Perhaps because he's Jewish, the most visible evil he can comprehend in his own mind and communicate is the Nazis. If that's the case, I would refer him to Dante's "Inferno", which introduced the idea of "levels of evil" some 800+ years ago.

OR, more than likely, he's padding his own ego by AGAIN calling everyone who disagrees with him an idiot in the most roundabout way possible. If this is the case, I would refer him to my extended middle finger.

Posted at August 11, 2006 2:14 PM in response to Who Is "Serious" About Terrorism?

Honestly, the U. S. knows so little about Castro, his government and even his immediate family, that I think it's a stretch to think that Cuba will see democracy in the ten years that follow the eventual death of Fidel Castro.

If we were to compare Cuba and the Soviet Union, I'd say that Castro is Leonid Breshnev, Raul is Yuri Andropov, an as-yet-unknown party apparatchik (a Chernenko) comes next, and THEN we get the equivalent of a Gorbachev in Cuba that opens it to the world at large and turns it into a democracy. By this conservative timeline, we wait about 15 to 20 years after the death of Fidel until Havana gets the Studebakers off the streets once and for all.

Posted at August 1, 2006 12:40 PM in response to Question of the Day: After Castro?

Am I the only one who finds it incredibly ironic that David Broder would refer to ANYONE as "elitist"?

Posted at July 31, 2006 10:01 AM in response to The End of Checklist Liberalism

How can anyone in his/her right mind tell Lieberman to run on the environment, affirmative action and reproductive rights?

Voting for Cheney's energy bill (like Lieberman did) hurts the environment.

Holding contrary opinions from his party about affirmative action (as Lieberman did in the 1990's) is not a net plus for Lieberman, although I agree with Mark's analysis on the topic above.

Finally, his opinions on which rape victims should get the morning after pill and where they should get it tells me all I need to know about Lieberman's opinion on reproductive rights.

The reason he's not doing well in the primary is that he has done nothing to clearly identify himself as a Democrat in over a decade. Lieberman calls how he operates "bipartisanship". Everyone of import in his party (namely Democratic Connecticut voters) would call it "capitulation".

Posted at July 31, 2006 8:08 AM in response to The End of Checklist Liberalism

Lieberman's joining the "Gang of 14" and voting for cloture to forward Samuel Alito's confirmation is a perfect example of why Lieberman is being handed his backside in a Democratic primary.

A true leader would take up the cause, no matter, according to Gerstein, how futile. For God's sake, STAND FOR SOMETHING. In parlance we all can understand, Lieberman was for Alito's confirmation before he was against it.

If you want the mantle of leadership, have the intestinal fortitude to make one decision and stick to it. Yet given how many times Lieberman has delighted in torpedoing Democratic causes, his lack of a definitive moral compass doesn't surprise me.

Posted at July 30, 2006 5:09 PM in response to Lieberman and Alito

Then why does he delight in appearing on Hannity's show on Fox? Why the cloture vote for Samuel Alito, a man who will dedicate himself to stripping away rights from Americans for one or two generations? Why the "short ride to another hospital" comment about emergency contraception? Why the tacit support for Social Security privatization? Why a vote for the big-bank-friendly bankruptcy bill? Why the happy vote for Cheney's blast-from-the-pollutin'-past energy bill?

This is more than one or two issues. If he's not a Republican, he's certainly happily enabling their awful stewardship of this country by continually biting the hands that feed him on his own side of the aisle. His votes do not reflect the values of the Democratic Party, and now he's more than happy to throw the party under the bus to protect his incumbency.

So, by my calculations, he's not a Democrat. By your calculations, he's not a Republican. How about a new label? How do you feel about "Weasel"?

Posted at July 27, 2006 2:25 PM in response to If Lieberman Loses. . .

Rumsfeld is in for the long haul. To fire Rumsfeld would be to admit a complete failure of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war, and Bush is too stubborn to admit this.

Lieberman will be a lobbyist for Big Pharma. After this election, he'll need to hide his increasingly thin skin from the public, but still find a way to immorally fill his pockets as a lobbyist.

So much for his moral streak.

Posted at July 27, 2006 8:43 AM in response to If Lieberman Loses. . .