Walter Shapiro has a piece in Salon today about Joementum's primary challenge from Ned Lamont. Most of the piece is an up-close look at both candidates, but early in the article Shapiro puzzles at why Lieberman is so disliked by liberal Democrats:

As a punching bag for left-wing activists, Lieberman somehow ranks up there with Tom DeLay and Dick Cheney. Yet according to the National Journal's 2005 Senate vote rankings, Lieberman's centrist record is on par with that of West Virginia's Robert Byrd, the octogenarian war critic lionized by the blogosphere.

Other Democrats are forgiven their ideological transgressions, but never Lieberman. In Pennsylvania, Senate challenger Bob Casey has overwhelming party support even though he is antiabortion and supported Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. (Lieberman, in contrast, is pro-choice and voted against Alito.) It is almost forgotten that California Sen. Dianne Feinstein supported all of Bush's deficit-creating 2001 tax cuts. (Lieberman voted against them.) And Hillary Clinton, the winter-book favorite for the 2008 nomination, has not exactly been marching in antiwar demonstrations.

Who said Casey, Clinton and Feinstein were off the hook? And when Byrd voted for the bankruptcy bill, I seem to recall that he received quite a bit of netroots feedback.

But I will admit that there's a special sort of animus towards Joementum. Maybe it's because of statements like this:

When I asked the Connecticut senator why he has become such a lightning rod, Lieberman said, "It is something that speaks to this moment in our politics, which is very partisan and very much are you with us 100 percent or are you not with us? And there's a lot of -- I can't think of a softer word than hatred. In the Democratic Party there are a lot of people who have the same kind of hatred -- which I find is self-defeating and almost certainly wrong -- towards Bush that a lot of Republicans had toward Clinton."

The guy repeatedly demonstrates that he just doesn't get it.

The kind of hatred towards Clinton was materially different than the disgust of the left with Bush. The dislike for Clinton was purely personal and had nothing to do with policy, at least overtly. Yes, many on the left take lots of potshots at personal characteristics of Bush. But the dislike of Bush is policy driven. The guy is in the process of dismantling the Constitution, responsible for torture, wants to suspend habeaus corpus, is destroying the long term prospects of the U.S. economy, has set back peace in the middle east for a generation, is responsible for the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people, and on and on and on. How in the world can any sane person even compare that to Clinton's misdeeds?

But ole' Joe just sees it all as business as usual. To Lieberman, the Republican administration of George Bush has just been a typical swing in politics that deserves no distinction from any other administration. In other words, it's just politics as usual. As he continually displays that attitude in everything he does and in all public appearance (many, many public/media appearances vs. Casey/Feinstein/Byrd and even Hillary Clinton), he is the poster child and lightening rod for everything that is wrong in the Democratic establishment. And he's delusional. He's the guy who sat with military people in Iraq saying that the war was going swimmingly, as mortars are going off in the background.

Ned Lamont is putting forth a significant, no-lose challenge to Lieberman. Even if Lamont loses, perhaps a message can be sent to Lieberman and other Democrats that the rank and file are fed up with "bidness as usual". The conservatives have put forth a whole other type of politics that is based a theocratic, dishonest aggression. Left unchecked, we end up with a dictatorship.

BTW, while I'm on the subject and if you can, send a little love Lamont's way.