Give them unmitigated hell, Joe

Financial Times- Lieberman hits out at 'paranoid' Democrats

By Edward Luce in Washington

Published: November 9 2007 02:00 | Last updated: November 9 2007 02:00

The 2008 Democratic candidates are beholden to a "hyper-partisan, politically paranoid" liberal base that could endanger the final nominee's chances of winning next year's presidential election, Joe Lieberman, the former vice-presidential Democratic candidate, said yesterday.

In his most outspoken attack on fellow Democrats since he was unsuccessfully challenged last year by Ned Lamont, a liberal Democrat, for his Senate seat in Connecticut, Mr Lieberman yesterday said he might not vote for the Democratic presidential nominee next year.

How's that taste, Hill?

He argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a "moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish" foreign policy that was established by presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

"The Democratic party I grew up in was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders," he said.

Is there the slightest shock in that conclusion?

Every republican commercial show demostrate how very much the forces which control the democratic party today dislike the way of life we have been handed, and how much they regard the founding ideas of the nation itself as wrong, and even evil.

Although reviled by many in the Democratic party's base, particularly among the "netroots" of groups such as MoveOn.org and Daily Kos, Mr Lieberman's comments play directly into the increasingly testy exchange between Hillary Clinton, the party's presidential frontrunner, and her principal rivals.

In September, Mrs Clinton voted for a Senate resolution sponsored by Mr Lieberman that called for economic sanctions against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for allegedly sponsoring terrorist groups that -target US forces.