Opinion: Joe Lieberman, McCain backer and ex-Democrat, tries to keep his Senate committee chair

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Well, looks like it’s time for Joe the Senator to pay the political piper.

Joe Lieberman is the Democratic senator from Connecticut who was his party’s VP nominee just eight years ago but got dumped by his state party in 2006 over his Iraq war stand, got elected as an independent with quiet Republican assistance, caucused with the Democrats as an independent to give them the 51 seats for Senate control (and him a committee chairmanship), then broke with his former party to support his current friend, John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, and was talked about as a possible VP but he’s not a woman and John lost so Joe’s not gonna become secretary of defense after all and now Joe faces an enlarged Democrat Senate majority led by happy Harry Reid, who never looks that way and doesn’t need Joe so much anymore, so Joe’s angling to keep his committee and calm down the hard feelings over his speech at the Republican National Convention by talking about bipartisanship like the president-elect does, and we’ll see pretty quick here if anyone on any side really believes in that kind of change that we need.

It is, after all, Washington.

We’ve all now heard of Joe the Plumber. Well, this may very soon be Joe the ex-chair.

So here’s Joe’s line via video. And he’s sticking to it. (No questions, thank you.)

-- Andrew Malcolm

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