Nedrenaline!

It can become addictive!

That's what last Tuesday in Connecticut proves. Things had gotten so bad with Lieberman's misrepresentation of Connecticut voters, that Joe provided them with an opportunity and an excuse to make a dramatic improvement. And Ned Lamont's underdogging Lieberman can prove to be allegorical to what can happen nationally.As Margaret Carlson wrote last week,

Democrats are fed up with the bipartisanship that gets the wrong things done. . . . The day of reasonable, centrist politics for most Democrats is over.

Over because the other side doesn't practice it. Over because this president who launched a war deceitfully and with insufficient planning and troops doesn't deserve it. Over because if you disagree with the president over his disaster in Iraq, you are accused of wanting to cut and run, of not supporting the troops.

Lieberman's determination to delay his departure from the Senate at all costs will amount to an unbecoming epilogue for which his biographers will have to deal. He is like an athlete playing past his time. So far, in his four-day effort to do so, he discloses his true colors.

Have you noticed his line on Lamont is as shrill as the Republicans'? Have you noticed how Lieberman's supporters have called Ned Lamont an "Al Sharpton Democrat"? How Lieberman stated on the Today Show that he was committed "to bringing the Democratic Party back from the extreme, back from Ned Lamont and Maxine Waters."

Have you noticed how his line (thanks, Em!) on opponents to our Iraqi occupation has become Cheney-esque?

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.

His state's constituents are smart enough not mistake Lieberman for bipartisan. True centrists don't cozy up with radically Un-American Neocons. His loyalties are clearly not to his (former) party. In fact, he has already switched parties. Since Tuesday, Lieberman has become Bush's other poodle, second to Tony Blair.

Who's Ned Lamont?

Remember back when people were asking that? "Lamont Cranston?"

It's a different tune now. I hear comparisons of Ned Lamont to Eugene McCarthy, disrobing emperor LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primary. Ned L. has proven that the party of loyal opposition does not have to tip-toe around our self-anointed "war-time president" like a bunch of Lilliputians. As someone observed last week,

". . . Democrats like Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden shift progressively more in favor of withdrawal from Iraq and is certainly going to alter the entire spectrum of political views over the issue of Iraq, not only for Democrats, but for Republicans, too. In short, this is likely to be the turning point -- downward -- for the Bush presidency."

Political seismographers are detecting a sea change. Like Lieberman's overstay in the Senate, things have gotten so bad on a national and international scale that Democrats have been provided with an opportunity and an excuse to make a dramatic improvement.

Impossible as it is to overstate the need for a political tsunami, it's equally impermissible to expect a storm tide capable of lifting boats from Lilliputian shores without unstinting effort.

Let's get it done.