Dan Froomkin has an excellent round-up of the by-and-large disgusted responses from various politicans, reporters, editorial boards, and opinionmakers to Vice President Cheney's comments last week suggesting "Al-Qaeda types" would be encouraged by Ned Lamont's victory on Tuesday night.

But what have we heard from Joe Lieberman on Cheney's comments?

Silence.

No... worse than silence. He parroted Cheney by saying Ned Lamont's Iraq policy - the unified Democratic Iraq policy and the policy favored by over 60% of the American public (and more of Connecticut) - would mean a "tremendous victory" for the terrorists.

And today, even worse.

In today's Hartford Courant there is a full-page ad supporting Joe Lieberman, paid for by a Republican 527 group called "Vets for Freedom," which is being run by Dan Senor, the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and a name floated widely as a possible White House Press Secretary after Scott McClellan resigned.

John Stauber has more about this group and the integral role it is slated to play in the Rove noise machine that was cranked up once again this past week in advance of another election:

White House strategist Karl Rove has made clear his strategy for Republican victory in November is to run on the war in Iraq. For him VFF and similar groups such as Melanie Morgan's PR creation Move America Forward, are weapons on his political chessboard. Rove phoned Lieberman on Tuesday as Democrat voters were turning thumbs down on Lieberman for his pro-Bush cheerleading on Iraq. Karl Rove denies he offered help to Lieberman, but the battlefield arrival of VFF shows that Republican troops for Lieberman are already on the ground and firing at will.

As Republican donors run to support Joe and Democratic voters and politicians run as far as they can away from him, it's clear why he has not said a word about Vice President Cheney's comments this week. These are the people and groups he needs to win over in order to remain at all financially and politically viable.

But just because this is Lieberman Party's only strategy for survival doesn't mean it will be an even remotely successful one.

Running with Bush and Cheney wouldn't work for Republicans in Connecticut, and it surely isn't going to get the Lieberman Party very far in a very blue state. As Tom Swan said today:

It is not surprising that Joe remains Bush’s favorite Senator, he is looking to run the exact same campaign that Bush did in 2004. Fortunately, the voters of Connecticut were smart enough to reject it then and we are confident they will again. It is alarming to see how far Joe will go, undermining every candidate across the country from his former party, to cling to his spot in Washington.