Time to Declare Victory and Go Home?
Time for the Good Guys to declare victory in the Connecticut senate race, that is.
Six months ago it looked like 2007 would see a senator from Connecticut who would support Donald Rumsfeld and the other creeps, and accuse fellow Democrats who criticized Bush in Iraq of seeking to "undermine the president's credibility," and that "we undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."
Now--no matter who wins the Connecticut senate race in November--we will have a shrill critic of George W. Bush and his Iraq policy:
Lieberman calls for Rumsfeld to quit - Yahoo! News: "With all respect to Don Rumsfeld... we would benefit from new leadership to work with our military in Iraq," [Lieberman] said on CBS's "Face the Nation." Lieberman said the Bush administration should have sent more troops into Iraq "to secure the country."
"We had a naive vision that the Iraqis were going to embrace us and then go on and live happily ever after."... Lieberman accused Lamont of distorting his stance on Iraq. "He made me into a cheerleader for George Bush and everything that's happened.... I've been very critical over the years... about the failure to send enough American troops to secure the country, about the absence of adequate plans and preparation to deal with post-Saddam Iraq..."
That is a big victory.
Now don't get me wrong. Ned Lamont would, I think, make a much better senator than Joe Lieberman. Whether you think of Lieberman's ghoulish necrophilia for Terry Schiavo, his say-one-thing-and-do-another "opposition" to the bankruptcy bill and to Alito, his carrying of Bush's water on Social Security, his eagerness to block attempts to make corporate accounts more accurate--there are a lot of reasons besides Iraq to judge that Joe Lieberman is a very, very low quality Democratic senator.
But the Lieberman-Mark-II we are offered today is a vast improvement over the Lieberman-Mark-I of six months ago. That is a big victory. That will remain a victory even if Lamont fails to get his just reward for his political entrepreneurship, and Lieberman eeks out a victory in November.
