Joe's not going to do that.

This is getting out of hand.

You try running a Democratic Party campaign when most of the Democratic establishment has little desire to see you win. Lamont did his part by getting a monumental upset in the primary. At that point, he needed the Dem establishment to do their fair share as the Republican national party , by freak circumstance, felt it was more beneficial to them to support lieberman instead of their own party candidate. There were pockets of the Democratic establishment in CT that were hostile to the idea anyone would dare oppose Joe. Just read up on the postmortems to see the many hurdles the Lamont campaign faced. Even the local press which now has turned against Lieberman was in his pocket. Yet all the criticism the Courant has waged against Lieberman in recent months were known facts back then.

Some people put the campaign behind them, show that they've got some class and grace, and suddenly they're "taking it up the ass?"

Personally, I think there are many, many valid reasons to oppose Lieberman.  But revenge is not a good way to advance your agenda.  As evidence of this, the people who are closest to this situation voted by a two-thirds majority not to strip Lieberman of his Chairmanship.  I just keep thinking of the movie "Carlito's Way" where the main character (Carlito) severely disrespects some two-bit gangster at the beginning of the movie without thinking twice about it.  Carlito goes through the whole movie destroying and then rebuilding his life as a gangster only to be killed in the end by the nameless two-bit punk.

It may seem easy and completely logical to burn this bridge right now, but there will be a price for it.  We are, as the saying goes, heaping hot coals on the head of Joe Lieberman right now by giving him a break.

Your taking this oddly personally, and constant metaphors like "taking it up the ass" are telling me that there might be something going on other than a simple desire for good policies.

Also, you're willfully distorting what I said.  I don't like Lieberman.  If I had had my way, he'd be the least powerful member of the Senate, but I don't, and just about everthing you've mentioned has been true for years, and he's still been the Chair of really important committees.

There was time in the last 8 years when their ideas were good? Because that is the point in question. If Bush's ideas were good, they would have applauded him for running a tight ship by getting rid of whiners.

Hear, hear!

It goes far beyond differences on a couple of issues.  It goes to his efforts to undermine the Democratic Party.

So it's a Jewish problem now? 80% of Jews voted for a guy whose middle name is Hussein, for the sake of the country.

Mosquitos don't pick sides.  They just suck your blood and give you malaria.

OK then, swatting a bug isn't a good analogy; no one was suggesting throwing him out of the caucus. Try this: if your pet chimpanzee is behaving very badly, would you attempt to firmly discipline him in a way that's liable to really teach him a lesson, or would you play it very cool, in hopes that you yourself will be such a model of good behavior that the chimp  will just realize it should play nice?

Yes, because now he'll look like an ingrate to his buddies in the press, instead of just the people who care about issues.

I believe that Lieberman is much more severely weakened in his current position and seriously beholden to the new President and his 'pals' in the Senate who threw him a bone today. Only time will tell which of us has the correct understanding of what happened inside this scurrilous piece of shit's inner weasel over the last couple of weeks, but I stand on my bet that he is now Obama's beotch, and understands thoroughly that he will be severely punished if he doesn't perform like a trained seal for the foreseeable future.

Like I said, time will tell who is seeing this correctly.

"What makes you think Lieberman won't vote against Obama and the Democrats?  His sterling record of the last few years?"

On what?  Domestically?  Lieberman has a liberal record.  Why would he suddenly vote differently than he always has?  

On the war in Iraq?  Obama has vowed to pull troops out of Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration.  That would be around May 2011. Isn't it kind of interesting that over the last few days all of a sudden a timetable for withdrawal has shown up, a pact worked out by the Bush administration and Iraq, committing to a hard timetable with all US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011 at the latest, no matter what the situation on the ground?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/world/ middleeast/17iraq.html?_r=3&ref=toda yspaper&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

So, they'll split the difference in the middle somewhere, go with August 2011 and call it a day.  The end result will be that ALL US troops will be out of Iraq sometime in 2011, we no longer have this as a potential problem to be discussed endlessly.  Don't believe for a second that this sudden and stunning reversal had nothing to do with the election, but the end result is a complete and full withdrawal from Iraq, just the same.

Other issues to watch related to Homeland Security would be Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, the hunt for Bin Ladin, Guantanamo Bay and the larger issue of torture.  I am not sure, given the somewhat hawkish posture we have seen from Obama on some of these, that there is really a huge gulf between him and Lieberman.  

You're talking in absolutes.  That kind of talk is never fully accurate.

You are wrong.  On war issues Lieberman sucks.  On domestic issues he is liberal, not moderate, not Blue Dog, but liberal.  That is the reason there was not a big uproar against him.  If he were a Blue Dog conservative Democrat, he would have been unceremoniously stripped of his positions today.

Again, I personally wanted to see him get his right due for being such a jerk, but strategically he can be the difference between legislation getting pushed through or not.  I had said previously that the closer we get to 60, the likelier it will be that Lieberman comes away with a mere slap on the writst.  In a way, for those who wanted to see Lieberman taken to the woodshed, the Alaska and Minnesota Senate results could not have come at a worse time.    

Not as soon as we'd be revisiting it if he'd bolted the caucus and everyone who's interested in seeing the Democrats fail would use it as an excuse to block them at everyturn, because of what they did to poor Lieberman.

Their aren't any particularly good choices.  There are also more important issues - in another thread, someone said that they were tearing up their membership in the Democratic party.  Really, this is what made you do it, and not, say, Iraq?

I'm not interested in revenge - seriously.

Moving forward, is it better to allow him to keep his chairmanships or not?  Their are bad and good things about either option.

I am committed to his defeat in 2010.

But isn't he Muslim?  Why would he be sending Xmas cards.

snark