Another reason Al Gore should have been elected in 2000:

That creep Joe Lieberman would have been effectively neutralized as VP for four or eight years and he wouldn’t be fucking things up in Congress today. He’d be some Douschebag Emeritus on a bunch of right-wing non-governmental boards with about as much political clout as Tucker Carlson’s bowtie.

Instead he remains in the Senate, caucusing with the Dems, giving them a pyrrhic 60-vote majority that they can’t do a goddamn thing with because he votes against them every time.

(I’m actually pissed at a co-worker this morning, but since I don’t blog about my job I’m gonna take it all out on this sack of shit I didn’t know they stacked that high.)

What a complete and utter bastard this Lieberman guy is. At the time, when he was the first Dem on the Senate floor to call Bill Clinton out for getting caught with his pants down, I thought it was kind of cool. Somebody on our side had to do it, I figured, and I was glad it was this cuddly, unthreatening white-haired dude from New England.

(In my defense, I also believed Clinton hadn’t diddled the intern until he confessed, so my political naïveté at the time must have been pretty impressive to behold.)

I caught Lieberman’s act on Sunday morning and the headlines today… I love it when politicians dismiss the disenfranchised with a casual “only 4 or 5 million people will be adversely affected…”

Since when did four five MILLION people become a small number?

A city will marshal all its resources and spend scores of thousands of municipal-level dollars to keep a single hard-luck-case from jumping off his roof to become street pizza. One person. Who is statistically likely to try it again and succeed later, but society deems his life important enough to ante up the dollars it takes to get him off the ledge in one piece.

And we have a whole generation of Americans trudging into middle age—myself among them—whom Joe Lieberman (and to be fair, the rest of his ilk) are willing to write off as acceptable losses. Collateral damage. Four or five million. That’s only one or two fewer million than the number of Jews Hitler killed in WWII. And Senator Lieberman is on record as believing that those millions of people, that’s a big number.

Which it is, which is my whole point. One human life is a big number. I get that politics necessarily deals with large numbers, usually involving human lives at some level. So at the same time as it’s killing me to watch the health care bill dying the death of a thousand cuts in Congress, I know that some dancing with the devil is required.

But thanks to Lieberman being the Dems’ 60th vote—which he never gives them—their paper majority is a sham. And even the perfectly reasonable idea of moving Medicare eligibility up to 55 dies aborning.

Guys like Joe Lieberman are making this a shittier country for my son to grow up in and I take that personally.

I am so pissed at my co-worker…