Senator Joe Lieberman Thanks Imus For Vicious Name-Calling?

Senator Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut, is one of Imus’s favorite Senators, and he extended a warm welcome this morning to his friend of more than 20 years.
 
Wait a minute.
 
Before allowing Imus to proceed, Charles was compelled to come clean with Lieberman on exactly how he was characterized by Imus just three short days ago.
 
“You were disloyal, you were a worm, you were a weasel, and would never get on this program again in this lifetime, or any other,” Charles said. The reason for Imus’s outburst? He mistakenly thought Lieberman blew off appearing on this program last week, in the wake the announcement that he will not seek reelection for a fifth term in 2012, then freaked out when he saw Lieberman on "Morning Joe". In reality, Imus had advised his producers not to book Lieberman last week, since the schedule on this show was already pretty full.
 
But as with most Imus in the Morning guests, Lieberman has already been called those names, and usually worse, by Imus. “You were doing it in the 90s when nobody else was doing it,” Lieberman said, pointing out that such immature name-calling had actually prepared him for the vitriol he’d come up against later in his career.
 
Predictably, Lieberman insisted his decision not to run for reelection had nothing to do with polls suggesting he could not win, and everything to do with politics becoming intolerably vicious. “You can’t just disagree with somebody, you’ve really got to hate them, and you’ve got to express that hate whenever you can,” he said. “It happens on the Left and the Right, Republicans and Democrats, and it’s ultimately destructive for our country.”
 
That Lieberman, who used to be a Democrat, has often found himself at odds with his former Party might be traced back to the 2000 Presidential election, when the then-candidate for Vice President insisted it was not necessary to challenge military ballots during the recount, a move that could have handed his Party a victory.
 
Lieberman shrugged off that possibility, saying he defended it to Tim Russert at the time, and has no second thoughts about what he did then, or during the run-up to the Iraq War.
 
“Historians are going to argue about this forever, but in my opinion the most authorized independent report…concluded that Saddam had both the assets and the expertise—he was preserving the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction once he broke out of the sanctions,” Lieberman said, choosing to focus instead on the end result.
 
“We’ve got a government there that’s not perfect, but it was elected, it’s allied with us, it’s anti-terrorist, and it’s probably the most representative government in the Arab world,” he said. “I think we’re in a better place than we would have been if we just let it go.”
 
With two years left in the Senate, Lieberman is not focused yet on what he’ll do next, but feels great about his decision not to run. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “It’ll be 24 years at the end of this ter;, 40 years in elected office; I’ve run 15 campaigns in Connecticut. I want to try something else.”
 
A likely story. “I just don’t believe any of that,” said Imus, who has heard this song and dance before. “It takes the jaws of life to get you guys out of there.”
 
Said the man whom Lieberman referred to today as “the Strom Thurmond of radio.”
 
-Julie Kanfer