- His was one of the most vocal votes in favor of the Schiavo bill despite disapproval by 76% of Americans (which had to include his own constituents).

- He has favored school vouchers, and also flip-flopped on them.

- He voted for an end to debate on the most dangerously conservative Supreme Court justice appointments.

- He did the same for the bankruptcy bill, despite the statistical fact that most middle-class Americans declare bankruptcy because of overwhelming medical bills, not because of too many vacations to Aruba on their Visa card.

- He supported the energy bill that provided big subsidies to big oil, which is reaping shamelessly big profits right now.

- He voted in favor of Alberto “Torture is Okay” Gonzalez, Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, and Condoleeza “Secretary of War/Peace – Same Thing” Rice.

- He supports free trade agreements that benefit foreign countries more than American workers.

- He has indicated he might favor Social Security privatization.

Does this sound like a Democrat? And the fact that his candidacy was endorsed by neoconservative extremists like Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, DeLay, O’Reilly, et al., should be the most telling of all.

It wasn’t *just* about the war.

Sorry, what? Straight from the top ten Repub talking points, American voters are now considered “insurgents”. Does that mean our government is going to have to quell the insurgency?

When a majority of voters changes a political path, it is not an insurgency. It is called democracy.

Articles like Weisberg’s reflect that DC consultant mentality, in which the Republicans have everyone cowed and fearful of looking like a “cut and runner.” The fact is that the voters are away ahead of those guys.

As for Lieberman, it may have been a one issue race to the rest of the country, but for anyone who actually pays attention to what the voters in Connecticut were saying, it was way more than one issue. And the notion that opposition to Liberman was based on his support for the war is pure Republican spin, which Weisberg repeats as gospel. There are other Democratic senators who support the war, and they haven’t attracted the kind of opposition Lieberman did. It was his undermining of the party, his siding with the Republicans on key issues like the bankruptcy bill (and please don’t give me that 90 percent BS. The vast majority of the votes in the Senate are not contentious or split on party lines. It’s the few key votes that matter) and his willingness to criticize his own party for opposing a Republican President. Not to mention his “Joe first” attitude, exemplified by the way he ran for VP and Senate at the same time. People around the country didn’t pay much attention to that, but Dems in Connecticut haven’t forgotten his willingness to throw away their vote and hand his seat to the Republicans, just to advance his own interests.

I understand the Republicans spinning this. It’s the lapdogs in the press who dutifully repeat the spin who are demonstrating once again how out of touch they are. They’re the last group that is still intimidated by the White House.

“Responding to a presidential tasking, Clarke’s office sent a memo to Rice on September 18, titled “Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks.” Rice’s chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda. The memo found no “compelling case” that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. It passed along a few foreign intelligence reports, including the Czech report alleging an April 2001 Prague meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer (discussed in chapter 7) and a Polish report that personnel at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad were told before September 11 to go on the streets to gauge crowd reaction to an unspecified event. Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Finally, the memo said, there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons.”
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch10.htm

This sounds a bit more nuanced than your description – sounds more like “there was some evidence, but it was far from conclusive”. Is there somewhere else in the report that you’re referring to?

Secondly, how sane is an editor who one psychoanalyzed Hillary based on her iPod list? http://www.slate.com/id/2142359/
That must have been a frist, it’s as crazy as brain diagnosis via TV.

Lastly, why listen to this guy now when he has a record of changing his mind completely only a few moinths later, like he did in Jan. 2004?
“For my part, I have indeed changed my mind this week. I no longer think I was correct to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq last March. That’s hard for me to say, since as I noted at the outset, I’ve itched to depose Saddam Hussein by violent means, since 1991. But Bush was the wrong president to do it, and last year was the wrong momentâ€â€?based on problems I didn’t perceive clearly enough because of my impatience to see our unfinished business in Iraq finally completed.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2143331/

Hey, generally, we expect editors of a reputation like Weisberg’s to know what they are talking about. But in this case his ’soft spot’ for Lieberman may turn out to be a solid log in his eye.