Our long national nightmare is (almost) over

The world is indeed ending in 2012 -- for Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, the leader of his one-person Connecticut for Lieberman political party. He'll announce tomorrow that he's not seeking re-election for the only reason that most U.S. senators don't seek re-election: He knows he'd be clobbered at the polls.

I wish Lieberman would leave the Senate tomorrow. I know a lot of people think that Lieberman's unpopularity -- which exists among all thinking people but is probably strongest among the left -- is because he's a victim of extreme partisanship, that a man can't be a centrist or a bi-partisan bridge builder in this country without tounching a political Third Rail.

That's a lot of malarky.

Because when it comes to the one thing that matters most in life -- war and peace, life and death -- Joe Lieberman was not a centrist at all. He was an extremist, a warmonger -- an ethusiastic cheerleader for a conflict that was based on lies from Day One, and when those lies were exposed, and when the citizens of Connecticut that he purported to represent turned righteously against the war in Iraq, Lieberman did not care. He doubled down on support for a war that was clearly wrong. Some 4,000 American men and women died, spilling real blood for Lieberman's warped abstract concept of how the world needed to be arranged 11,000 miles away from their hometowns and their loved ones. So did thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children. I'm sorry if I'm not able to praise Lieberman as "a statesman" as he slinks away into retirement.

It's hard to fathom which is scarier -- the fact that Lieberman was a handful of votes in 2000 from being a heartbeat away from the presidency, or the fact that he spent 2008 campaigning to put Sarah Palin in that same job.

Whatever. Goodbye, and good riddance.