After Joe's breakdown on the air yesterday afternoon, Colin McEnroe responds on his Courant blog:

Joe Lieberman was a guest on our show today, and he was very, very angry at me. In particular, he was offended and insulted that I took the following quote "out of context" in a column about him:

It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril.

The quote, he said, came from a speech. Read the whole speech, he said angrily, several times on the air. Several times, also, he urged me to notice that he encouraged the Republicans to adopt a similar sense of forgiveness in the very next line.

So I did read the speech. And what did I find?

The speech, overall, is an exercise in self-massage disguised as bipartisanship. It congratulates Lieberman for being Lieberman. It urges everone else to be ...more Lieberman. Lieberman is right. Everyone should read this speech, so they know what he really means when he calls for bipartisanship. He's really calling for an uncritical endorsement of his own behavior.

It gets better, a complete takedown of Joe's self-serving rhetoric and his defense of it as "bipartisanship." Read the whole thing.

McEnroe ends with a challenge to Senator Lieberman:

Lieberman's peculiar notion of bipartisanship begins with the other side agreeing to set aside its qualms about a catastropihic set of mistakes (and, possibly, deceptions) that has left America in a financially, diplomatically and militarily ruinous mess. Inasmuch as he was one of the ones who pushed hardest for these policies, it's a little self-serving. It's a little bit like beginning a baseball game by asking the other team to issue 27 consecutive intentional walks. Forget about our rationale for getting into the war. After all, we have.

Now, of course, Lieberman will have to lash into all the other people who quoted those exact words out of context. He can start with Bob Schieffer. Think he will?