As if being kissed by Bush weren’t enough, now Senator Joe Lieberman feels himself in the clammy embrace of Vice President Dick Cheney. Yesterday Cheney held a teleconference with reporters in which he bemoaned the fact that Democrats would “purge a man like Joe Lieberman.”
“Purge”? Uh, isn’t it called a “primary”? But then the Vice President always chooses his words for maximum fear factor. As the Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne points out: “that word ‘purge’ has a nice Stalinist ring, doesn’t it?”
Cheney then told reporters:
“The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, [from] the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the Al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”
[Is] “the dominant view of the Democratic Party”…”the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home.”
And they’re all on message. Yesterday GOP chair Ken Mehlman called the DNC “the Defeat-ocrat Party” … “that once stood for strength now stands for retreat and defeat.”
And Tony Snow said: “It’s a defining moment for the Democratic Party, whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party they’re going to come after you.”
And, speaking in his first public appearance since losing the primary, Lieberman used the U.K. terror arrests to call Ned Lamont’s goal of withdrawing American troops from Iraq by a fixed date a “victory” for terrorists.
“If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them, and they will strike again.”
Low blow, Joe.
