Little Green Firedogs (Pt. 2): On Bill Clinton's decision to campaign for St. Joseph:

Big Dog may not have taken it personally when Lieberman stabbed us all in the back with his speech on the floor of the Senate during the impeachment hearings, but many of us did. Loyalty to machine politics runs deep.

"Stabbed us all in the back?????" Of all the reasons one should support Ned Lamont, the fact that his opponent attacked President Clinton for lying under oath about an affair with an office underling should be way, way down on the list.

Hey, I love Elvis, thought he was the best President of the last half-century, hated Ken Starr and his GOP masters in Congress, and strenuously opposed the impeachment of the President. The entire matter was a ginned-up attempt to nail a politician they hated, and should be correctly regarded as one of the most distateful periods in American political history. Thanks to the GOP, the use of the impeachment mechanism to remove a President will be seen as a partisan stunt for a long time to come, something that a Congressional majority does to register its displeasure with a President of the opposing party.

But anyone who is so morally abtuse as to regard Clinton's behavior during the Lewinsky Affair as appropriate, not worthy of censure, really has a hollow core. In the autumn of '98, Clinton didn't do anything to earn our loyalty with his boorishness and dishonesty, so how can anyone other than his most obsequious retainers feel that Lieberman "stabbed us all in the back." Fighting for liberal principles doesn't entail putting on our collective kneepads everytime a Democrat is under attack for his sleazy transgressions.