It’s hard not to get the sense that Joe Lieberman is just taunting Dems at this point. Lieberman doesn’t want to just burn the bridge to the ground, he wants to pour salt in the earth around the wreckage.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Lieberman joined a conference call coordinated by a right-wing House member to bash Barack Obama. Today, he announced the creation of what he calls a “new grassroots organization,” called, “Citizens for McCain.” From the letter the McCain campaign distributed today (no link available):<\/p>\n
Citizens for McCain is an organization within the McCain campaign for people who put country before political party and support the candidate for President who has a proven record of bipartisanship. <\/p>\n
As you know, I caucus with the Democrats as a United States Senator and was the Democrat Party’s nominee for Vice-President of the United States against President Bush and Vice President Cheney. <\/p>\n
But first and foremost, I am an American. I have an obligation to do what I think is best for our nation regardless of political party.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A couple of things. First, how far gone is Lieberman? In his letter to “fellow McCain supporters,” he uses the far-right, grammatically-wrong construction: “Democrat Party.” Pathetic.<\/p>\n
Second, Lieberman calls Citizens for McCain a “new grassroots organization.” It isn’t. In fact, by all appearances<\/a>, it’s not an organization at all — it’s just a gimmick of the McCain campaign, cooked up to collect money and addresses. Campaigns come up with these gimmicks all the time, but for a sitting senator to announce that he’s the “chair” of a “new grassroots organization,” when there is no actual organization<\/em>, is pretty ridiculous. <\/p>\n
Maybe Obama needs to back him up<\/a> against another wall.
\n
\nOn a related note, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid conceded<\/a> that he’s had to take Lieberman aside.<\/p>\n“I’ve had conversations with Lieberman at some length. I’m not going to discuss the conversations here. But I think the discussions he had with Obama yesterday and the discussions he had with me yesterday were fruitful. We’ll let the future decide what it’s going to be, but I’m not about to threaten anybody.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m not blaming Reid in the slightest, but the discussions were obviously not<\/i> “fruitful.” The day after the chats, Lieberman is talking about the “Democrat Party” and announcing that he’s the head of fake fundraising group for the Republican presidential candidate.<\/p>\n
Lieberman has to see the writing on the wall, but he clearly doesn’t care. He has seven and a half months before the next Congress, with a larger Senate majority, convenes, at which point Lieberman will have lost just about everything — his role in the party, his committee chairmanship, the respect of his constituents, and his ability to be a key player on the Hill.<\/p>\n
I wonder if he’ll think it was worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s hard not to get the sense that Joe Lieberman is just taunting Dems at this point. Lieberman doesn’t want to just burn the bridge to the ground, he wants to pour salt in the earth around the wreckage. Yesterday, Lieberman joined a conference call coordinated by a right-wing House member to bash Barack Obama. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}