Lieberman Loses

The angry left defeats the sitting Senator from Connecticut and VP candidate from 2000 in the primary. We live in radical times. The MSM of course refuses to see the angry left as “radical” at all, since they are so close to what the reporters themselves believe. Even to come up with their usual leftward slant, they feel that they are “pulling punches” and forced to be “conservative” by their editors and the owners of the media outlets that they work for. Their hearts are over with the wing of the Democrat party that managed to defeat Lieberman in the primary.

When I hooked up at the Anchorage Airport, Time/CNN was already lamenting the thought that the Republicans would be able to “exploit this”. Their little articl was pretty weepy about “Just when the Democrats should be in the drivers seat with Bush’s low poll numbers, trouble in the mid-east, etc, they will “use this” to try to develop a “wedge” to their advantage. Hardly seems fair … somehow, all the of the reasons for disliking Bush are “real”, but the Democrats themselves voting out a guy that was good enough to be a VP candidate 6 years ago is some sort of a “fake issue”.

While the media spends a ton of time trying to make the Republican party out to be “radical”, “extreme” and “out of the mainstream”, it is pretty clear which party that is actually true of. Lieberman is a moderate Democrat, but WAY less so than Olympia Snow, Lincoln Chafee, or even Arlen Specter are “moderate Republicans”. Lieberman is more the Democrat equivalent of John McCain in the Republican party, or even in many ways George Bush.

The reasons that Bush’s poll numbers are as low as they are is because he is quite moderate, and loses at least he poll favorable ratings from 10-20% of the Republican party … the “no social programs, isolationism, budget balance at all costs, close the border if you have to shoot Mexicans” wing of the party. The media is pretty quiet about that wing right now, since they are just happy to see Bushes numbers low, and certainly don’t want to portray him in any way as a “moderate”.

So does the right wing of the Republican party stay home in November as the MSM and the Democrats hope? Does the leftward tilt of the Democrats bring more folks to the Republican side from the middle ground of the Democrats (a trend that has been going on since Reagan)? These are key factors on which the election will turn, at least we know where the MSM stands.