| Lieberman kept the chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security committee. There's been much hair-pulling and blouse-rendering from the left blog-o-sphere, and somehow the gesture is supposed to show us we're irrelevant, etc & co. It may be.
Or, maybe Howard Dean's right, if a candidate runs and triumphs on a message of "unity" and bipartisanship, it may be bad form to start the new era with a "purge," as Dean put it.
Whatever. I never really saw the Lieberman vote as a referendum on the progressive base in the first place. Heck, it only came to a vote because Lieberman was "disloyal" to Obama and Democratic Senate candidates, not because of his myriad crimes against his former party, US foreign policy, the electorate, and the concept of reason.
Bottom line: the reason Senate Democrats should have denied Joe his committee chair was to take investigative power over the Obama administration out of his hands. This was the opportunity for the Senate to act in its own best interests. The Senate Democrats fumbled.
Maybe ol' Joe won't abuse his committee chair. Who knows? But if he does...well...we warned you, didn't we? |
