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Ned Lamont had a few things to say about Lieberman’s support for Bush’s Iraq war in an open letter to Joseph Lieberman posted on The Huffington Post today.  Here’s an excerpt:

“As the battle for Baghdad just gets underway,” you write in this week’s piece, congressional opponents of the escalation “have already made up their minds about America’s cause in Iraq.”

On the contrary, Senator, it was you and President Bush who had already made up your minds before the war started, using cherry-picked intelligence to sell the war to the American people. And if the battle for Baghdad is “just getting underway,” how do we explain the escalating violence over the last four years?

You claim that “a precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake.”

Actually, Senator, it was the precipitous invasion that you supported, along with its disastrous aftermath, which left the security vacuum that exists today – a vacuum which the terrorists, insurgents, and militias have all rushed to fill.

You plead for elected officials to “come together around a constructive legislative agenda for our security.”

Senator, we have already done this. The result was the bipartisan (remember that word?) Baker-Hamilton report which called for a redeployment of our troops over twelve months, plus aggressive diplomacy, as our best hope to bring stability to the region. The report’s conclusions were widely accepted by a strong majority of Democrats and Republicans, and then promptly disregarded by you, the President, and all those who had “already made up their minds,” the facts be damned.

…

On November 8th of last year, while voters across the country were giving Democrats a mandate to change course on Iraq, you were able to muddy the real “Choice on Iraq” for the voters of Connecticut. They thought they were choosing between two candidates who anticipated “significant” troop reductions by the end of the year, who both wanted “to bring our troops home.”

Senator, one of us still believes in those words we spoke during the campaign.

Lieberman is a Bush boot-licker. 

So how did the people of Connecticut get fooled into voting for Lieberman?  Most of them probably weren’t fooled.  I seem to recall something about Republicans not voting for Alan Schlesinger  because he didn’t have a chance of winning, so they voted for the de facto Republican, Joseph Lieberman.  Lieberman won with 50% of the vote.  Lamont got 40% and the Republican got 10%. 

When you do the math, you find that “Democrats” took 90% of the vote in Connecticut, yet their senator doesn’t represent the will of the Democrats in his state.

Democracy is a messy, frustrating thing…