She's fair game, Joe. It's always open season on princesses.

This is an excellent take on the state of politics today.

The new chair of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Clintonista Bruce Reed crooned in a Slate.com article that Specter’s defection was “an encouraging omen for Obama’s effort to build a new, pragmatic, post-partisan politics.”

“Post-partisan politics” is code for a politics that basks in the glow of the status quo—a politics that accommodates itself to the needs of corporate America. In this context, “ideological politics” becomes code for people who care about such quaint principles as democracy and justice. People like crazed ideologue Chris Bowers.

It never ceases to amaze me how short-sighted the giants of American business seem to be when it comes to ceding political power to the electorate. They're unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifices and continue to demand that they not only have the biggest seat at the table, but have last word on everything.

They seem incapable of understanding that this situation cannot continue in perpetuity. If the little guy isn't tossed a bone once in a while history shows us they'll become so frustrated and take it upon themselves to change the status quo, through whatever means necessary. In that case it won't matter a wit what the giants of business think about the issues at hand- they won't be at the table in the first place.

FDR understood this seventy years ago. Why was the lessen lost on our political and economic leadership today?

Just try and stay out of my way. Just try! I'll get you, my pretty and your little dog too!

It was a great night and I hope a harbinger of things to come. Perhaps we really can turn back from the precipice. American politics have always swung like a pendulum between ideological philosophies and I've always thought that the real genius to Karl Rove (despite his complete amorality) is that he recognized this long ago and set about trying to find artificial ways to keep that pendulum from swinging back. Perpetual war seemed to be an answer to his prayers.

Now we have Ned Lamont and a whole host of progressive bloggers and activists standing on the arm of that pendulum jumping up and down and just trying to get it moving again.

I almost feel sorry for Lieberman. Atrios has bit up from a Matt Lauer interview this morning in which Droopy Dog says the following:

Well, I think it's time for somebody to break through the dominance of both parties by the margins of the parties, which happens in primaries. I think it's time for somebody to break through and say, Hey, let's cut out the partisan nonsense.

Is it Joe's intention to vindicate all those that spent the last six months screaming that he's out of touch?

He just ran in a primary for the nomination to the Senate for the Democratic party. It doesn't get any more partisan than that. The time to pull this "I'm an independent and I'm holier than thou" bullshit was years ago not on his political deathbed. That just looks pathetic.

Joe isn't alone in his delusion. Jane Hamsher has a terrific post-mortem up where she points out that the DLC deadenders will be egging Joe on in his run as an independent-

I know Joe has vocal support from DLCers and so-called "centrists" who see themselves next in line if Lieberman falls. They want Joe to hold back the barbarian horde for all of them. ItÂ’s a stupid, shortsighted and solipsistic construct. The self-righteous indignation of people like Lanny Davis and Martin Peretz are buoying Lieberman into a wholesale purchase of the myth that he is a great man and a great wrong has been done to him. Here on planet earth we call it a primary challenge, an integral part of the Democratic process. It's time for Joe to realize that in their own blindness they may be preparing him as the sacrificial lamb.

But what of Joe's true friends; the conservative Republicans? I spent a good portion of last night on Fark.com reveling in the shrieks of the conservative hordes and their "we'll-show-you" petty threats. The rank and file initial, pre-talking points reaction seemed to be somewhere between that of a slug after you've just poured salt on it and a bully who just got socked in the nose by the fat kid he's been taking the lunch money from for months.

Today the message coming from the Right can pretty much be summed up as "We told you this would happen and it's good for Republicans." Redstate tries the ho-hum approach by dismissing the results and saying Joe will win easily as an independent. Paul at Powerline tries to spin it as a victory for John McCain because it takes Lieberman off the presidential stage but at least he recognizes the war is unpopular, even if he does trip up during this part of the analysis:

To be sure, Connecticut independents are more likely to agree with Lamont than with Lieberman on the major issue of the campaign -- the war in Iraq. But last night proved that, even among many Democrats, support for the war is not a deal-breaker.

I don't think that's entirely true. Paul's completely underestimating the power of machine politics the kind of which supported Lieberman and kept the race as close as it was. But more importantly the war in Iraq is only the most visible gauge of where a candidate stands on supporting George W. Bush. Support for Bush will be very much a deal-breaker in the general election with Democratic voters. Candidates who haven't sufficiently distanced themselves from the President, on the war and a host of other issues, won't be returning to Washington.

That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawls at one time or another, and I'm here to kill you.

I'm going to steal an AP quote from Tristero's great letter to DLC types up at Digby's.

President Bush proudly declared that American foreign policy no longer seeks to “manage calm,” and derided policies that let anger and resentment lie “beneath the surface.” Bush said that the violence in the Middle East was evidence of a more effective foreign policy that addresses “root causes.”

Everybody's going to parse the hell out of that quote and Tristero himself does a good job of highlighting the sheer, unadulterated insanity inherent in Bush's comment but I'm interested in what this actually says about our stated foreign policy coming from the mouth of the President of the United States: we believe in violent resolution to disputes as the only way to resolve conflict. Anything else is simply "managing calm."

As a young man, with memories of Vietnam still very strong in this country, I studied history and looked at the "peace first" crowd and decided they may have been idealistic but they were naively wrong.

There are evil men in this world. Souless, heartless, evil people to which negotiation won't work. Men who when presented with a flower of peace will put a bullet through it right into your skull without batting an eye.

Peace - the refusal to consider violence as an option to resolve a disagreement, even as a last resort - is untenable in reality.

But if those that see peace as the only answer are naively wrong what does that say about those that see violence as the only answer? Aren't these two sides of the same coin of those that would oversimplify the solutions to a very, very complicated world?

When I watch this administration continue to try and enforce an insane "bigger club" foreign policy on the world I see nothing more than hippies with nice haircuts and guns who believe that wishing the world were different would MAKE the world different. Instead of love they see fear as the thing that'll change men's hearts. As if either has ever worked before.

There are no shortcuts to geopolitics. People like Bush who think they're clever because they think they've found a shortcut wind up taking all of us off a cliff.

(cross-posted at Fark)

Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk down middle, sooner or later, get squished.

I would hope that Democratic leaders would take Matt Stoller's advice...

The admission that progressives are winning influence within the party is something I've noticed since my four years in politics. The party has been moving away from the DLC model of triangulation, and towards the politics of contrast. This is natural for an opposition party, but it also means that not listening to the progressive base could cause an increasing number of problems for centrists Democrats.

...to heart but I won't hold my breath.

Stoller is commenting on a piece by Ben Smith claiming Hillary Clinton is a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination (tons of money) and has a "50-50 chance" of actually winning the White House. Amazingly he doesn't say a thing about this bombshell.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that despite Hillary's money she doesn't have a chance in hell of winning the Democratic nomination and, were she to beat those odds she would be squashed like a grape in the highway in the general election.

Centrists and DLC types have consistently underestimated the strong sentiment against the Iraq war among the Democratic base. They have continued to try and play the middle by taking a powder on confronting the President both pre-war and, even more importantly in my view, after the invasion as the country sank into a bloody civil war. More than anything the Democratic party nominee for President in 2008 cannot be a pro-Iraq war candidate. The base simply won't have it.

But were she to beat the odds and slap the base down by winning the nomination her candidacy would be DOA. The political strategy she's been operating under seems to be an assumption that her base is in the bag (hardly) so she can afford to take "centrist*" positions early on in order to attract undecideds in the general election. Conventional wisdom has held that undecideds are the ones that actually decide elections.

George W. Bush has proven that this particular bit of conventional wisdom is wrong. Voters have become increasingly apathetic over the last several years with the importance of undecided voters diminishing as fewer and fewer actually go to the polls. The important thing to winning an election now is getting out your base on election day.

Short of a very public mea culpa and a loud denunciation of the war in Iraq and Bush's handling of same there's no way the Democratic base would turn out vote for Hillary and she would lose the election handily.

(* With over half the country now opposed to the Iraq war I'm not even sure you could say that a position supporting the President's handling of same could be deemed "centrist.")