Lieberman says 'goodbye' to the Senate

and we say 'good riddance':

Senator Joe Lieberman said goodbye to the Senate yesterday on the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. The 12 years between Al Gore’s last stand and the oratorical conclusion of Lieberman’s decades in the Senate is a very compelling frame through which recent American history can viewed.

At the center of it all was Lieberman, who went from a tragic figure to a failed presidential candidate in 2004 to a polarizing and hawkish asset for the Bush administration following the invasion of Iraq. For this, Lieberman became a pariah within his own party and was spurned by his liberal Connecticut base, a group on which he exacted revenge when he ran as an independent and crushed Ned Lamont, the man who beat him in the state’s Democrat primary.

Notably, the Senate chamber yesterday was nearly empty. As Dana Milbank observed:

The sparse attendance wasn’t unusual for a farewell speech, but it was a sad send-off for a man who was very close in 2000 to becoming a major figure in American political history as the first Jew on a major party’s national ticket...

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