It's clear that as the ultra-left wing of the DNC battles for control, they're using the Iraq war as their litmus test for what appears to be a potential purge of the party.
Lieberman has LOADS of criticisim for Bush and about how Iraq and the WOT are being fought. The only commonality with the White House that he has is that he agrees that the WOT needs to be fought and for better or worse, we need to finish what we started in Iraq. That's pretty much Hillary's pretend-moderate platform, and the ill-focused schlock Kerry ran on in 2004. So it shows you just how hard to the left they're trying to pull. The only difference between Lieberman and them is that he believes it, and to them that's why he had to go.
Liberman makes a few moderate Democrat noises about morality, keeping naughty video games away from kids, and such, but otherwise he votes pretty much lock-step with the DNC on the domestic agenda, and other than defense, he's very liberal. The complicit mainstream press is painting Liberman as some sort of huge Zell Miller maverick, when in reality he's just an old-school Democrat who can be worked with on occasion, and still has his sense of patriotisim, at least on the international front. In essence, he's a hawkish Jimmy Carter.
Liberman's excomunication from the Donkey's holy fold says volumes more about the direction of the DNC than it says anything about Lieberman. IMO, this is the first crack in what I suspect will be the eventual fracturing of the party. The DNC is bouyed up by way too many single-issue voters, Unions, Minorities, Greens, Gays etc. Other than the Union issues, most union members are pretty socialy conservative, and aren't to sympathetic to the gays, and they know the environmental movment hurts their employment. Many minority communities are extremely homophobic etc. Cosmopolitan urban gays look down on blue collar workers etc., and that makes the DNC a house of cards.
The other DNC core consituency, the depression and WWII generation that'll pull the leverl for a Democratic corpse in hopes it'll channel the spirits of FDR and Truman are dying. Every day they're less a factor in the polls, except for Chicago, of course...
By going hard-left under the Soros-funded hijack of the party, the DNC is going to split off many of their single-issue voters when the party goes too far to the left for them on everything else. The gays will be screwed, having lost it all in the backlash against thier push for marriage rights, and the greens seeing no more clout in the DNC's not-so-big tent, will go with the Green party The hard left will celebrate their purge of the "ideologicaly pure" DNC that's now a shadow of it's former self, and never be in the majority again.
The superficialy pragmatic reason DNC and it's new masters keeps flirting with turning hard-left because it energizes the bean-sprout and granola base creating the appearance of vitality in the trenches during primaries, but come election day, the middle and the middle-left gets more and more put out, and either just sits at home, or maybe even holds their nose and votes for a moderate Republican&
If the DNC can't make serious gains in '06 and '08 and relax a bit, out of sheer spite the party will eat itself, and will follow the Liberman pattern over and over again.
Not that I'm complaining.
