What he did for love - Colin McEnroe | To Wit: Alas, John McCain did silence his better angels and did run, as The New York Times editorial says today, a nasty, dispiritng campaign often based on anger and fear.
But there were things McCain himself would not do or say, and quite often those very reprehensible things were done and said instead by Joseph I. Lieberman.
Way back in April, Lieberman called the whole matter of whether Barack Obama is a Marxist "a very good question."
And in Florida, last month, Lieberman said Obama's associations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers were legitimate questions because "we don't know much about" Obama.
It's fair to say that when the McCain campaign veered off on its most dishonorable and disreputable vectors, Lieberman went with it and seemed ready and eager to shovel some of the most noxious garbage -- stuff McCain really didn't want to get all over his hands.
One person who noticed, I believe, was Barack Obama. Everyone has marveled at Obama's almost uncanny calm and cool during a hard-fought campaign. We never saw him lose it. Well, almost never. Virtually the only day you ever saw Obama lose that cool was the day in June when he backed Lieberman up against a wall in the Senate and, out of earshot, let him have it.
Obama strikes me as the politician least likely to seek revenge. But I don't think he'll have to ask for Lieberman's head. Lieberman bet his whole stack of chips on McCain and then crossed every imaginable line of decency pursuing the win. There are Senate elections unresolved right now, but even winning all of them would not bring the Democrats, with Lieberman's unreliable help, to 60 votes.
So he's gottta go. He should be stripped of his chairmanship. He should be banned from the caucus. He has behaved like a creep and dragged the public discourse into the toilet.
Ostracism is, after all, a fundamental and historic democratic tradition.
UPDATE: If Harry Reid has any doubts, he might want to consider the fact that Lieberman spent part of yesterday on conservative talk radio urging the preservation of the fillibuster, which essentially means, "Don't elect too many Democratic senators today."
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