Action

There was a lot of negative media energy flooding out there today around Joe "Sore" Loserman, from Hannity's reactionary lies on Fox to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow spewing up-is-down partisan commentary on how the Democrats have hurt themselves by appearing too partisan.

The GOP rightwing forces and their enablers, both corporate and neocon, are going to be trying to poison the air and bully away or steal the election for their buddy, Joe, starting with the phone call from Karl Rove to Joe today. Joe and his wife and close friends with Dick Cheney and his wife.

When do you think the media will hit on that?

We've seen this all before, folks. It's the GOP fear card. With all their failed decision-making, policies, war lies and disaster mismanagement, it's their only remaining card.

It's important to focus on the positive, on the hope. That's what Ned communicates in his speeches and TV appearances. Don't go by the soundbytes -- that's all the GOP are working on, since they can't coherently articulate a philosophy that doesn't sound stupid given the facts of 2006. Ned is the real deal, and while he may be too much of a political novice to have crushed Lieberman in his victory speech, he'll learn, you can feel it.

Aside from Joe's few AIPAC friends in the DLC (someday I promise to explain all this, but only if Lamont is elected Senator in November), the Democratic Party and apparatus has wholeheartedly endorsed Ned Lamont, the elected candidate. So for him to continue his Ralph Nader-esque vanity quest (yes, I get the irony), it's going to be GOP or lobbyist money. If his poll numbers go down far enough even those $ dry up.

Not Many Senators Have Found Themselves in Joe Lieberman's Predicament, and certainly every case has the potential to turn out differently than any that have come before:

It is very rare for incumbent senators to lose in their party's primary: since 1960, only 19 have so fallen.

In Joe's case it is, at the end of 18 years in Washington, D.C., a position on Iraq as internally unchallenged as our Presidente's, and it infects everything. I'm sick of this domestic moderate/military hawk construct that seems to think there's a wall between the violence we engage in the world and our civil rights, governmental corruption and overall quality of life here in America. It's exactly this blind, misguided "hawkishness" on Iraq, and before that Vietnam, that continues to undermine our greatest political, moral and physical infrastructures here at home.

And cut it out with any suggestions that those of us on the left don't believe there's any real world conflict with Al Queda or the radical Islamofascist movement. What we know is that our invasion of Iraq (and now Hezbollah's war with Israel) has only fuel-injected their cause. I take that shit seriously and wonder why the BushCheneyCo cabal is fucking it up so much.

Ignorance + Greed = Death.

And now we have the hope side of the ledger. Be like free American, Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), author of the attempt to censure el Presidente over his breaking of the FISA law and another public endorser today of Ned Lamont:

Although Feingold touched on issues such as education, health care, renewable energy and affordable housing, many of his comments focused on the Iraq war.

Feingold said Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman's primary loss to anti-Iraq war candidate Ned Lamont is a warning that the Iraq war is an issue that won't go away and be replaced by other issues.

The Iraq war has been a "disastrous mistake," he said, and warned politicians that "you are simply not listening if you don't know the American people have had it with this mistake and want it to end."

I certainly don't expect Joe Lieberman to ever be someone who helps make that happen. Not based on his track record. Not based on his speeches.

And don't we all just, in the final analysis, want it to end?