Ned Lamont, Saddam Hussein, and Cynthia McKinney

Work with me here a minute.

I think I've figured out a piece to the GOP and media freak out over Lieberman losing his primary. It's the Iraq war all over again.

The Republicans have learned that lying pays, and they need to lie mightily about Joe Lieberman's defeat before it bites them in the ass. For example, Bush tells us that Saddam has WMD, so we need to invade Iraq. Now, Bush knew no such thing, he was just lying in order to get his way. Then when the public found out Saddam didn't have any WMD, Bush and company continued to lie about Saddam and Iraq, claiming that they did in fact find WMD just a few weeks ago (they didn't), and now claiming, still, that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda (he didn't). As a result, Bush has yet to be held responsible for the debacle he's made of our foreign policy and our national security, not to mention the war on terror (when does that start, anyway?).

Lesson learned? If you want to divert the American people from something that could cause you pain, just lie about it. The second half of this lesson is that the media will gladly repeat as truth any lie the GOP feeds it.

Now back to Lamont. Let's think for a moment as to how dangerous it is for the GOP that Joe Lieberman, the closest thing you can get to a Republican, someone with clear and strong ties to George Bush, and someone who staked his reputation on repeated claims that the war in Iraq was going real swell, got destroyed in the polls?

Why would that be bad news for the GOP? Because Lieberman is the opening salvo in the fall elections, and it ain't lookin' pretty for the GOP if people who seem:

1. Republican;
2. Close to Bush; and
3. All too willing to embrace Iraq as a success story...

...are getting obliterated at the polls. If the voters gave a decisive "no" to Republican-lite, just imagine what they're going to do when they get to chomp on the real thing this fall at the polling booth.

And that, my friends, is why the GOP is pulling out all stops in order to paint the Lieberman loss as some sign that Democrats all want to have Osama's children. The Republicans need to do anything they can to switch the topic away from the real lesson of the Lieberman defeat: Republicans and their surrogates are toast this fall.

And finally a word about my favorite wackjob Cynthia McKinney. She lost her run off last night, and not because she wasn't liberal enough. The woman is a veritable loon of leftyness, and yet she went down in flames. But, you might ask, how could that be so? The GOP told us that Democrats only vote for crazy far-lefties, so shouldn't McKinney have won resoundingly?

No. And that's why you don't hear the Republicans crowing about McKinney's loss. It ruins their narrative. You see, McKinney went down in flames partly because she's a nut, and the new Democratic party isn't really in the mood for nuts. But second, she went down because she's an incumbent, and because of the fact the Republicans have so made a mess of Washington and the world, incumbents are going to be under intense scrutiny this fall. Which brings us back to Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont.

The Republicans don't want scrutiny. Whether it's the ever-growing disaster in Iraq, Joe Lieberman's bizarre embrace of an incompetent president and his failed presidency, or the defeat of a liberal woman which proves that Dems don't necessarily always embrace the far-left and which proves that incumbents are in danger. None of those facts serve the Republicans well at all in the coming fall elections. So they simply lie about it and hope to change the story. And the media eats it up.

Deja vu, anyone?

PS Has anyone else noticed the irony of a political party run by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, whose top issues are Terri Schiavo and bashing gays, telling Democrats that THEY'RE too extreme? That would be a bit like Ken Mehlman calling me a... oh, never mind.