7 Days

Until the Ct. Dem. primary between Lieberman and Lamont. It's a really really big deal.

Salon has an interesting profile on Lieberman’s problem, here:

In 1979, Joe Lieberman was the majority leader of the Connecticut state Senate. That august body took up, as it did every year, a bill that would have allowed people to create living wills so that their families would know their wishes as they lay dying.

The lobbying arm of the Catholic Church fought and beat the bill every year. During the long-winded 1979 debate, as Joe Lieberman sat listening to a Catholic colleague denounce the bill as "man playing God," a 25-year-old newspaper reporter plopped down in a chair next to him.

"Why does it always break down that way?" the reporter whispered. "The more conservative argument always invokes God. The liberals always insist that God has no place in a debate in an American state legislature." (Lieberman was playing nanny that year to a group of rookie liberal senators, mostly disciples of Rep. Toby Moffett, and one after the other they were rising to argue for separation of church and state.)

Lieberman whispered back and forth with the reporter. "Why doesn't somebody make the argument," the reporter asked Lieberman, "that medical science has exceeded the will of God by keeping people alive when they're supposed to be dead? Why not suggest that living wills represent a kind of restoration, allowing people to live in communion with the will of their Maker?"

At that, Lieberman fixed the reporter with a serious look and said, "That's the most interesting thing anybody has said to me all session."

The reporter brightened at such praise, only to watch in disappointment as Lieberman voted against the bill, which failed again.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the article is that Lieberman truly is an unprincipled shill, and career politician.

And it sort of goes without saying.. in the little example of living wills, the Catholics lobbied successfully for many years to prevent people from making their own end-of-life decisions. Which of course is yet another example of the evil of the Catholic church, destroying the American principle of church/state separation, and inflicting their delusions on ordinary people that have a right to decide for themselves how they conduct their lives.

But for Lieberman.. I'm reminded of cold war era "sleeper" agents. The wingers might just have planted Liberman in the Democratic party in order to undermine it... Okay.. well, that's highly unlikely, but the net effect has been the same.

** update **

And you know.. what just occurred to me.. I've never lived in a blue state, or even a "swing state". I don't have the greatest track record in the world when it comes to actually casting a ballot. That's a bummer. It would be cool to cast a vote in an election like the Ct. primary.

During the last election, it was Bush vs. Kerry - and I live in Texas. Instead, I cleared brush..

** update 2 **

E.J. Dionne at the WaPo has a great editorial here:

Dionne's point is that the progressive challenge to Lieberman is exactly like the conservative challenge to liberal Republicans in the '70s that ushered in the bat-shit-crazy Christian fundmentalist Republican authoritarian-cult party we see today.

If that's true, it's extraordinarily good news. It could signal a balancing in the force, so to speak, and bring a new era of progressive politics to an America that is definately in need of it after the humiliation the right wing Republicans brought.