Good news from Connecticut. I know this is a day late, and the subject has already been beaten to death in countless blogs. But I just have to give a shoutout to the Democratic voters in Connecticut for dumping that asshole Joe Lieberman in their U.S Senate primary. For several years, I’ve used Lieberman as a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the Democratic party. Finally people are starting to wake up.
The nice thing about Lieberman is that he makes it so easy to hate him. He doesn’t just have Republican-like opinions on major issues. He’s got their typical arrogant hypocritical attitude. For example, he accuses Lamont of partisanship and polarization. Even in his concession speech, when most candidates would be promising to unite in the upcoming battle, Lieberman continues to sling mud:
I am disappointed not just because I lost, but because the old politics of partisan polarization won today… I expect that my opponent will continue to do in the general election what he has done in the primary … partisan polarizing instead of talking about how we can solve people’s problems, insults instead of ideas.
Sounds like he’s the one who’s not interested in talking. Lamont promised long ago to support Lieberman in November if he won the primary, but Lieberman isn’t interested in sharing that kind of unity.And speaking of insults, how about his statement that Lamont’s victory sends a message that “in the Democratic Party, there’s no room for strong-on-security Dems.” This accusation that people who oppose the immoral, illegal, and totally bungled Iraq war are not “strong on security” could have come right out of Karl Rove’s notebook. Rather than acknowledging that there are honest differences of opinion on how best to achieve security, he regurgitates the stale Republican mantra: “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.”
And his claim that he was trying to rescue the party from some radical fringe that had taken it over was just more bullshit. It was not long ago that he was bragging about being a “New Democrat”. He and his “Democratic Leadership Council” were taking the party in a direction shocking to lifelong traditional Democrats. Finally, when a significant number of them started trying to rescue the party from the “New Democrats” that smelled like Republicans, he accused them of being the ones trying to make radical changes.
In the final days of his campaign, his desperation became comically pathetic. Mr. Polarization was just lashing out blindly. He even blamed Lamont for his own campaign’s failure to hire a competent web-hosting service.
Good-bye and good riddance, Joe. And I’m glad to see that most of the prominent Democrats who supported his primary campaign have chosen the path of unity instead of more polarization, and are supporting the party’s duly nominated candidate in November.
An idealist might question the loyalty of “fair weather friends” who previously supported him, but are no longer supporting his run as an independent. If they thought he was a better candidate than Lamont last week, don’t they still think he’s a better candidate? Well, that’s not the way the system works. When the party’s voters choose a candidate, the party leaders support that candidate … at least the ones who really are interested in unity and compromise. It may not be a perfect system, but it’s one that many have decided is the most practical one. And, more important, it’s the one that Lieberman chose to work within when he thought it would benefit him. If he doesn’t like the idea of the party choosing a candidate and then unanimously supporting that candidate, he could have run as an independent from the start. But he wanted the party support, the support that Lamont pledged to give him if he won, the support he’s not willing to give in return. Goodbye ASSHOLE.