Get Me To Connecticut

Looks like Mr. Irrelevant Joe Lieberman might have a challenger next year:

Former Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. on Monday criticized Senator Joseph I. Lieberman's continued support of the war in Iraq and said that if no candidate challenged the senator on the issue in the 2006 election, he would consider running.

"When you've become the president's best friend on the war in Iraq, you should not be in office, especially if you're in the opposing party," Mr. Weicker, 74, said in a phone interview from his home in Essex, Conn. "I'm going to do everything I can to see that Joe Lieberman does not get a free pass."

He said that Mr. Lieberman, a Democrat, currently had no challengers, either from within his party or from Republicans, in his campaign for a fourth term. Mr. Weicker said he believed that no Republican would challenge Mr. Lieberman on the war.

"If he's out there scot-free and nobody will do it, I'd have to give serious thought to doing it myself, and I don't want to do it," added Mr. Weicker, an independent, who said he had been opposed to the war from the beginning.

Weicker was a Republican senator when Lieberman beat him in 1988, thanks to some help from (of all people) William F. Buckley. Weicker left the GOP and became a one-term governor of Connecticut as an independent. Change has happened so fast in the ideological hardening of the GOP that Weicker would almost certainly caucus with Democrats.

Though I think he's become completely incoherent on the war, and I despise his vilification of Hollywood as the root of all evil, Lieberman's actually a pretty consistent Democrat on many issues, particularly the environment. But as others have said, it's his willingness to run to Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and bash Democrats in a quixotic campaign to get "maverick" status that damages the Party. Last year, when he voted against the bankruptcy bill, but voted for cloture moments earlier (the procedural vote that was the best chance to stop the bill) and then had the nerve to praise his vote as trying to fight special interests, I said I was through with Joe Lieberman. Maybe Connecticut will approve of Lowell Weicker and dump this Vichy Democrat out of town.