Marc Ambinder [hearts] Joe Lieberman

Now that they don't have John McCain to buy donuts for anymore, it seems the media is all about lionizing Joe Lieberman.

Ambinder today wrote a piece about how Lieberman is only one Senator, and really, what can one Senator do to cause any problems. Uh, call any intern in the Senate and ask them what a Senator is and does for a living and even they could explain to you how one Senator is a king in that institution, at least when it comes to causing trouble. The Senate is not the House. There's this thing called the filibuster, and one senator can launch it, and one senator can even support it by not giving you the 60th vote to shut it down. Then there are holds (ask the interns about those too). And finally, the notion that Senate hearings have no sway, and that no one would pay attention to them should Lieberman chose to hold them, investigating Obama, is a simply bizarre thing to say for anyone who actually knows anything about politics.

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza took a parallel tact at religitimizing Lieberman today. Cillizza suggested that Lieberman only "to a certain extent" may have crossed the line in his criticism of Obama. Well, Lieberman suggested that Obama had ties to terrorists, said that Obama tried to cut the money off for our troops (essentially leaving them to die, as good America-hating guys with the middle name Hussein like to do), he said Obama would harm our national security, and he called Obama a "celebrity." Oh yeah, and he was the keynote speaker at the other guy's convention. Which one of those doesn't cross a line?

The media loves Lieberman. It's not clear why, but it's clear that they do. There's a real effort here to portray Lieberman's crimes as some kind of high school prank that only silly "lefty bloggers" would care about.

We're talking about a sitting US Senator crossing party lines and public endorsing and campaign for the Republican presidential candidate, while savaging his own party and suggesting that his own party's candidate has ties to terrorists and tried to let our soldiers die. And all this while the biggest cross our party has had to bear for decades is the the lie that we're terrorist-sympathizing America-haters who would rather let our troops die than win a war. What part of that isn't more than a high school prank?

If Ambinder and Cillizza, and apparently Bayh and Durbin and even Obama, feel that defecting to the other party, helping their candidates win office, and calling your own party's candidate a terrorist sympathizer is really not that big an offense, then the next time the Republicans call the Democrats unpatriotic America-haters I don't want hear a peep out of the Democrats or the media. After all, what Michelle Bachmann did was really just a high school prank. And is it time to rehabilitate Zell Miller too?