I have supported [Joe] in every election he has had - until now. This year I am supporting Ned Lamont to unseat Joe. Almost four decades of friendship with Joe has made this a wrenching decision for me.

...On the two biggest issues of our times, he is dead wrong.

His blind support of the Iraq war, begun illegally and a continuing catastrophe, is monstrous.

And his defense of an incompetent president, a vice president who fits the dictionary definition of fascism and an extremist administration that has perpetrated torture, illegal eavesdropping and a general shredding of the Constitution is insulting to the people who elected him in the first place.

At the Rajun Cajun, an eatery where the Greater Hartford African American Alliance meets over breakfast every Saturday, it took no coaxing to elicit complaints about Lieberman.

Waters, a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus who has clashed with Lieberman over affirmative action and school vouchers, addressed the alliance with Lamont, who has visited at least twice before. "I don't live around Hartford, but I'm told the present senator doesn't come here," Waters said.

"That's true," replied Steve Harris, a former Hartford councilman, who sat with arms crossed.

"Is the senator someone who cares about you?" Waters asked.

"Doesn't seem that way," someone called out.

"Tell me, do you think Ned Lamont has a chance up here?" Waters asked.

"Oh, yeah," Harris answered.

Our modern-day version of Mr. Smith goes to Washington is a capable and genial fellow who holds his ground without stooping to the base level of the other guy. ...

The Senate was never meant to be a career. It's supposed to be public service. Public service is what Lamont will give us. The other guy, well, he'll continue to give us phony stories about the war in Iraq going well and being in the interest of the American people.

But off the top of my head I can’t think of anyone who has epitomized the Incumbent Party dynamic to quite the extent that Lieberman has. His decision to run as an independent in the general election if he loses the Democratic primary is the perfect microcosm of the Incumbent Party phenomenon. It’s one thing to abandon your party when you have lost election, like Buchanan did (twice). It’s quite another for an incumbent to lose his party primary and then try to mount a general election challenge. To announce it before the primary, well, there can’t be much precedent for that. Can anyone think of any?

A giant papier-mache statue of George W. Bush kissing Lieberman on the cheek—the Senator's famed Britney-Madonna moment, which transpired after Bush finished his 2005 State of the Union address—sat on the back of a nearby pickup truck, thoughtfully provided by a group called Connecticut Bloggers. There was no mention from Lieberman of the elephant in the truck, no explanation of his alliance with the President over the war in Iraq...

...I could never imagine myself voting against him. But he was profoundly wrong about the most important issue of the past five years—and now, at the very least, he has to acknowledge that there's an elephant sitting in the pickup truck.

Senator Lieberman has a bit of a problem. He knows his weaknesses and he is projecting them onto his Democratic opponent, Ned Lamont. I am not a psychologist, but I have been dating one for over five years. As such, I certainly feel like an expert in the field of psychology–by proximity...

One of the Senator’s first lines of attack against Lamont and his supporters in the blogosphere was that we’re all just so angry. Take a listen to that interview Joe did with Colin McEnroe, and then head on over to the Ned Lamont Resource and listen to one of Ned Lamont’s interviews (I suggest March 29th) with Colin McEnroe. Who’s angry? It ain’t McEnroe and it ain’t Lamont. PROJECTION!