Rob Shvern on Politics

While campaigning in New Hampshire with political chameleon Holy Joe Lieberman, John McCain proudly tells potential voters that he’d like to stay in Iraq for 100 years.

Though the two committees have similar investigative powers and mandates to uncover waste, fraud and abuse of government funds, Waxman has held eight hearings on Iraq and contracting abuses this year, while Lieberman has held only one on reconstruction challenges in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

And though Waxman rarely has missed an opportunity to fire off angry letters to the administration over potential waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct among government contractors, Lieberman — along with his predecessor and current ranking member, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) — has shown relatively little interest in tackling those issues.

A year ago, seeking re-election, Lieberman said this committee was his top priority, and he was desperate to return to the Senate so he could wield the gavel. And now that he has the authority he sought, he’s decided not to conduct any real oversight of the administration at all.

He seems to have desperately sought a chairman’s gavel just for the sake of having it — Lieberman wanted power he had no intention of using. Instead of a Senate Committee on Government Affairs that functions as it should, Lieberman just treads water, using his gavel as a flotation device. It’s an embarrassing waste.

David Sarota reports on a new poll showing that Ned Lamont would easily defeat Joe Lieberman if the election was held today.

I noted that Lieberman’s entire general election strategy was about pretending that, if reelected, he would lead the fight to end the Iraq War. The man literally portrayed himself as the leader of the antiwar movement after he lost the primary. His very first ad in the general election was him looking to camera saying “I want to help end the war in Iraq.” During debates he said “No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do.” It was, as this well-known YouTube video showed, a positively Nixonian enterprise by Lieberman - and it was a deliberate effort to confuse precisely the same Democratic and Independent voters who now say they would vote for Lamont.

But now this key group of Democrats and Independents isn’t confused anymore because, since the election (and, as predicted) Lieberman has become even more supportive of the Iraq War, and is actually publicly pushing a war with Iran. You can’t turn on a television and see a story about the political debate over war without seeing/hearing/reading about Lieberman ratcheting up the saber rattling.

Had Connecticut voters had more information about exactly how Lieberman’s campaign to reinvent himself as an antiwar leader was a complete sham, that key segment of the Democratic and Independent voters might not have been confused, and the election - as the poll now confirms - would have gone the other way.

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1337

BONUS: Jon Stewart shows highlights of the insanity.