Nomentum

This week Joe Lieberman has gone from pious politician to Rovian dickhead. His supporters are disrupting Ned Lamont appearances and trying to pin it on Ned's supporters, like the FBI did to peace demonstrations under Nixon and Hoover.

Today Tom Delay gave his support for Joe over Ned on national television.

Here's all the other Republicans who are endorsing Joementum. If Joe doesn't get Rumsfeld's job for losing this race, it's a rip.

Look, it's not over 'til it's over. Maybe there's one last Liebersmear against Ned, maybe Ned has a little "accident" (although I doubt there's much flying around for candidates in a state as small at Connecticut). The polls are against him but lets count the votes first, or at least let Diebold feign it for us. But if Joe loses the Primary on Tuesday as is now considered likely, the rest of the Dem establishment is free to wrap Ned in their soft green embrace.

There's two nice pieces on why Joe is the wrong man at the wrong time. Steve Gilliard has a beautiful analysis of how Joe just forgot about even visiting the people he represents, and you can drive the entire border of the state in less than a day:

You can run against the party, if you deliver for the people. You can't ignore the people and run against the party and keep your seat.

Then Lieberman has literally run the worst campaign possible without a naked boy involved. Instead of flooding the state with people a month ago, trying to meet and deal with at least the local blogs, try to explain his actions, he acted like he was to the manor born. No where else in this country is that kind of high handedness as poisonous as in New England. People like their democracy direct there and Lieberman acts like William Howe and his fleet is waiting to take out New Haven if he doesn't win.

Lamont ran a smart campaign from day one, but Lieberman could have undercut it with some mea culpas and some smart campaigning. You don't go to black voters at the end of the day and expect a miracle when you're insulting them.

Gilliard, a fellow Jewish blogger who's also tired of Lieberman's accusation that the bloggers against him were all anti-Semites, puts it bluntly:

I could run a campaign against him with the things he's done. My 11 year old nephew could.

But if you want real invective, you got to read Mad Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone colorful evisceration of Joe and the Democratic Leadership Council that's been a power source for him over the years:

If you believe the propaganda emanating from Lieberman and his coterie of whore-cronies in the Democratic Leadership Council, Lamont is a dangerous, pillar-crushing revolutionary, a preppy, tanned mixture of Lenin and the Ayatollah. The Democrat insiders' strategy vis-a-vis Lamont is very similar to the one used to dispose of Howard Dean a few years back, only it's even more savage this time around: They have chosen to go after Lamont's supporters in the blogosphere, deriding the likes of "Daily Kos" founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and the wackos at MoveOn.org as "liberal fundamentalists" bent on liquidating poor Lieberman for the sake of radical leftist orthodoxy. The DLC started the smear campaign in June with an editorial called "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism" that used the word "purge" no fewer than eight times, in case you missed the KGB motif the first seven times.

Hey, Matt, tell us what you really feel!

He even met with Lamont:

When I sat down and talked with Lamont on a park bench after an appearance in Wallingford, he was plainly horrified when I compared the attacks against him to the campaign against Dean. "I hadn't thought about that," he said, adding quickly, "What you have to remember is that I'm a business guy from central Connecticut."

He talked about the assault from the party regulars: "Well, I've got grass-roots support that is perceived as a threat to the established order," he said. Then he scratched his head. "But it's weird. It's like there's a signal sent down from somewhere. The other day I was with this reporter from The New York Observer, and he was reading down a list of talking points: Why is it that bipartisanship can't exist in the party? Are you a pacifist? And so on. And I was like, 'Man, where is this coming from?'"

Of course it's fairly obvious where it's coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits "party insiders" steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters.

Everyone's feeling it, which is why the blogs and the new Democratic progressives and libertarians are coalescing away from the D.C. insiders, back to democracy again.

Taibbi cites Joe's involvement with "the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the notorious organization founded by Lynne Cheney that published a baldly McCarthyite list of 'anti-American academics'" and surmises:

A few years later, faced with a similar political choice, he chose to stand fast by Bush on the issue of Iraq, saying, "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril." Apparently the president deserves absolute loyalty only when his mistakes result in teenagers getting their heads shot off.

It was this last position of Lieberman's that forced the candidacy of Lamont into being. "We're trying to determine what the right boundary is on a Democrat," says Lamont spokesman Robert Johnson. "We know what the left boundary is. But what is it on the right? At some point, when a Democrat is sucking up to a president like George Bush, you have to put your foot down. Lieberman does not stop at a 'center.' The further right they go, he just follows."

For the good of the country and the world, let's hope Democratic voters in the great state of Connecticut draws the line on August 8th.