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Apart from his appalling votes on the Iraq War, warantless wiretapping, telecom amnesty, habeas corpus, torture, Gonzales and Mukasey, Lieberman is actively campaigning for John McCain! He's signalled his willingness to address the Republican Convention! In a recent tv interview he said of Obama:
"I'd hesitate (!) to say he's a Marxist, but his views are far to the left of mine and I think mainstream America's."
(In my experience, when people use the words "I'd hesitate to say", it's invariably followed by a slur they've been dying to make...)
Of course, in the real world, it's Lieberman's views that are, by a wide margin, unrepresentative of mainstream America's, according to virtually all available polling data. Lieberman, a notorious psephology junkie, cannot possibly be unaware of this fact. Yet he's willing to vote and lie for Republican policies that neither Democrats or mainstream Americans support. What's worse than his mendacious support for Bush, McCain & Republican policy, is his eagerness to enunciate one of the crucial forthcoming right wing smears on Obama - that he's an extremist, just short of a Marxist, far, far to the left of middle America. The fact that this same smear was used against he and Gore in 2000, Kerry/Edwards in 2004 and virtually every viable Democratic Presidential candidate for the past 20 years, doesn't seem to bother him in the least. I imagine it's not long before we hear Lieberman questioning Obama's patriotism, masculinity, "toughness", elitism, and Lieberman's own Jewishness notwithstanding, Obama's Christianity. Perhaps by then the other shoe might just drop for Harry, that Lieberman never "votes with us" on anything.
I understand the pragmatic reason's for Reid not wanting Lieberman to formally jump ship, but declaring him onboard for "everything except the war" is an insult to Democrats and an affront to the truth. Caught between the rock of Liberman's treachery and the hard place of a slender majority, Reid's silence would be considerably preferable to lies.
