Since I started this blog in September, I haven't really written anything about the senator from Connecticut.  Regular readers likely know my opinion of Joe without my typing a word.  In case anyone wasn't sure, however, I'll be plain: I can't stand him.

I can't stand his moralizing, imperious self-righteousness.  I can't stand his odd, arrogant disdain for the party that nurtured his career the past thirty years.  I can't stand his fake populist pose, all the while doing the bidding of corporate America better than many Republicans.  More than anything, I can't stand his neoconservative military ideology, and, in particular, his passionate, quixotic embrace of the Iraq War.

Unfortunately, he will likely win the general election on Tuesday, and retain his Senate seat.  Ned Lamont, whom I volunteered for and greatly admire, has waged a vigorous, principled, anti-war and progressive campaign for the Democrats.  He valiantly took Joe on in the Democratic primary and won, rightfully humiliating the Senator, whom had stopped behaving like a Democrat long ago. 

But when conservative, centrist Lieberman decided, post-primary loss, to run as an independent, he had the best of all possible worlds.  The scandal-tainted Republican nominee, Alan Schlesinger, is currently riding an election high of 9% in the polls.  That left Connecticut Republicans with only one credible candidate in the race they could stomach supporting—conservative "independent" Joe Lieberman.  And they have.  And that has left Ned Lamont running not against one candidate, but two—the Independent Joe Lieberman, and the Republican Joe Lieberman.  I know of few politicians with the electoral skill to surmount such a daunting obstacle.

I bring this up because of a piece on Lieberman I read in the Times today, detailing his drift to the right since his disastrous quest for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.  It was just one little quote from former Lieberman consultant Carter Eskew, but this one little quote really set me off:

Even before this year's primary, some of Senator Lieberman's advisers suggested that he run for re-election as an independent — not so much for fear of losing to another Democrat but because of the inevitable assault from the left.  Senator Lieberman rejected that advice.

"I think it was his sense that it was Job-like, that he had to go through it," Mr. Eskew recalled.  "It was probably a combination of things — one, the practical suggestion that he needed to say to people: 'I didn't leave you, you left me.  I didn't give up on you.'  To his credit, he did run in the primary.  And, to his credit, he didn't trim his sails."


"To his credit"?  To whose credit?  Joe's?

Joe Lieberman—in theory at least—entered the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut because he, oh, I guess wanted that Democratic nomination.  He faced a primary opponent, Ned Lamont—a candidate who raised millions of dollars to take on Joe for the same Democratic nomination, recruited thousands of volunteers, held numerous debates, and in the end, managed to win over enough Democratic voters to capture said nomination from the three-term incumbent, Joe Lieberman.  Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who liked being a Democrat so much, he let the Democrats make him their vice-presidential nominee in 2000.

Yet when Joe Lieberman lost the nomination of the party that had served him the entirety of his decades-long political career, did he respect the wishes of his party's voters?  Did he step aside?  Did he listen to what his party was telling him?

No.  He, instead, nominated himself.  To his own party: Joe Lieberman. 

So then, why did Joe Lieberman even bother with the Democratic primary, when he had already decided its results weren't going to make a bit of difference to him?  And why, Carter Eskew, does he deserve any "credit" for this ruse he played on the people of his state?

And that's what I can't stand about him most of all.  His protestations about doing it "for Connecticut", "for bipartisanship", and of course, "for his country" aside, his actions tell us everything.  He is only doing it for Joe.  The saddest part is that somehow, doing it for Joe is actually working.