Holy Joe facing primary battle in Connecticut

From Firedoglake, we find the story of a Connecticut newspaper editorial celebrating the need for a serious primary in determining who's butt will be sitting in Joe Lieberman's Senate seat next year.

Ned Lamont, take a bow. By challenging Joseph Lieberman for the Connecticut Democratic Party's nomination for U.S. senator, Mr. Lamont is encouraging a debate that his party and this state need to have.

This is not to suggest that Mr. Lamont, a cable entrepreneur from Greenwich, is the first person to raise concerns about Sen. Lieberman's support for the war in Iraq or portions of President Bush's conservative agenda. In letter after letter, readers of this newspaper have made similar points.

That's really the key point here, isn't it? Connecticut is a reliably blue state with a primarily progressive population. They elected a Democrat to the Senate and watched him turn into a raving Bush fan-boy. But the Democratic Party as a whole lacks the spine to stand up to one of their own when he wanders off the ranch? Yes, primaries cost campaign dollars, but I don't think either Lamont or Lieberman have much to worry about from whoever their GOP opponent winds up being in November. A lively, public debate in the primary could put things back on track.

Apparently Lieberman has taken notice and is trying to spin his record to control the damage. Firedoglake catches him at this game.

So I guess it's no surprise that Lieberman feels he's got to distort his record to boost his credibility with his constituents. I noticed this in the National Journal today (subscription):

For his part, Lieberman is taking his first-ever primary challenge seriously. His campaign Web site prominently features his lifetime voting records from such left-leaning groups as the AFL-CIO (82 percent), NARAL (95 percent), the Human Rights Campaign (90 percent) and the League of Conservation Voters (88 percent), which has already endorsed him.

Yeah and if you go back to 1977 Joe never voted to authorize the war in Iraq, either. The fact is that Joe's 2005 NARAL voting record is 75%, and that doesn't even include his cloture votes on judges that put both both Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. Nor does it take into account his recent comments telling rape victims to get up off the gurney and leave Catholic hospitals in order to get emergency contraception (which the hospitals will not even tell them they need). NARAL may not be willing to speak out against Holy Joe but to imply that they are 95% happy with his record is 100% bullshit.

Here's to hoping that the voters of Connecticut will get out of auto-pilot mode and put these two men to a serious test of public scrutiny. If they do, I think that Holy Joe will find that he's worn out his welcome. It's hard enough to do business as a minority party in the Senate. Having blue-dog backstabbers in your ranks undermining your efforts only makes things worse.