Joe Lieberman

If anyone asks you: what's with this business about three-term incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman from Connecticut being challenged in a primary by Ned Lamont? You should answer succinctly, as Barbara O'Brien at The Mahablog did: "Um, because his record sucks?" To help prove this point, you could do worse than steer people to her post and these other two:

DaveB at MyDD

Joe has been unwittingly helped McCain burnish his raging moderate reputation to disguise his raging conservative views on just about everything else. Again Joe is enabling Republicans to beat Democrats by propping up John McCain for 2008. Joe is not a statesman who gets things done, or a well-respected senator. He is a tool; a usefull well-meaning fool Republicans use. Ted Kennedy, like him or not, is a statesman. He has more legislation under his belt that actually has done great things for American than any other politican alive in America today. He is like Henry Clay good at getting his finger in the pie and making sure he gets the most out of his name being on there.

Joe has been against regulations and financial reporting of companies until Enron broke, and then he ran to the microphone, causing harm to the American worker and 401k holder while weakening Democrats who disagreed with him by calling them anti-corporatists.

He told Democrats not to attack Bush when George W. started his downward spiral in the polls. He fudged on Social Security while other Democrats stood down the swaggering president. He fudged on conservative judges because he thought Democrats would look to shrill complaining about this radicals. He is part of the "please let's not talk about Iraq!" coalition of consultants and pundits in the Democratic Party who think that "Kitchen Table Issues" will carry the day if we just ignore the number 1 issue on American's minds.

I don't want to get rid of Lieberman because he talks within GOP talking points, or he was the first to applaud Bush, or that he kissed Bush on the cheek, or even the War. I hope that Connecticut primary voters ditch Joe because his very presence in the cloakrooms, strategy sessions, talk shows, articles, etc. are a cancer on the Democratic Party's hope for reclaiming governing power.

Benjamin Simon in The Yale Daily News

But this race is about much more than Iraq. Just this past year, Lieberman voted to confirm John Roberts, and he voted against the filibuster of Samuel Alito LAW ‘75. He also voted for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who, as White House Counsel, called the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and was responsible for the legal justifications for torture at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons. Lieberman’s strong ties to industry left him standing alone as a Democrat willing to work on Bush’s ultimately failed privatization of Social Security. And just this week, he refused to join an overwhelming majority of lawmakers from both parties in opposing the Bush administration’s sale of administrative contracts for 21 ports to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates. Lieberman supported federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case, voted to stop federal aid to public schools that used materials “supportive of homosexuality” and, in 2002, he presided over the confirmation hearings for Michael Brown, the supremely unqualified nominee for FEMA chief whom Lieberman wholeheartedly supported.

It can’t get much worse than that, can it? Oh, it can. Perhaps Lieberman’s most galling characteristic is his willingness to appear in conservative media and to publicly and unreservedly bash Democratic policies and other Democrats. As a Democrat with a bullhorn, Lieberman can and does do more harm to the Democratic message machine than any Republican. It is no surprise then that his approval rating is 15 points higher among Republicans than among Democrats or that he has fundraising parties hosted by Republican lobbyists. He carries water for the GOP and reinforces GOP frames. Consider the case of Rep. John Murtha, a retired colonel. After many talks with commanders on the ground and other Pentagon experts, Murtha — an elder statesman of the House Democratic Caucus and a respected voice on security issues — called for a measured withdrawal of troops from Iraq. In response, Sen. Lieberman cried, “In matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” Murtha retorted, “What credibility?” It’s bad enough for someone like Karl Rove to routinely impugn the motives of Democrats; it is quite another for our own Democratic senator to do so.