Joe Lieberman has announced he’ll probably endorse both Republican and Democratic candidates in 2010, and that’s left us wondering who’d want a stamp of approval from Connecticut’s moldy moderate. (Look at all it did for John McCain.)

Given the senator’s relentlessly pro-war stance on Iraq, saber-rattling against Iran and, most recently, threat to join a Republican filibuster against health care reform, Lieberman shares no core values with Democrats. And any Republican he supports risks getting tea-bagged like that poor woman in upstate New York. An endorsement from Dick Cheney seems more politically convenient.

Still, somehow Joe Lieberman has made himself seem like an important senator. He of the Droopy Jowls dropped a bomb by declaring he’ll help Republicans road-block health care reform. Yes, he’ll vote against the bill; that was a given. But he also won’t vote for a procedural measure to cut off obstructionist debate about it by the shrill GOP minority. The Democrats easily have 50 votes to pass the health care reform bill. Lieberman’s was the 60th vote they needed to shut off the stalling and give it an honest up-or-down vote.

The loneliest little senator, who was evicted from the Democratic Party and took part in a losing presidential campaign that still steams Republican hardliners (and they’re all hardliners nowadays), saw how the fate of the entire American health care system seemed to hinge on every little utterance from Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) for two weeks and decided he had to get himself some of that. After all the compromises seemed over and Harry Reid had finally weaned himself off Xanax, Lieberman announced doing nothing was better than implementing a public option for the uninsured.  

Apparently, a neutered government-run health care program that might cover 2 percent of the population when it takes effect in 2013, and which states could opt out of, is more menacing than doing nothing about 47 million uninsured Americans (223,000 of them in Connecticut) and health care costs that have doubled in the last 10 years, and will double again in the next 10 if nothing is done, for those who have insurance.

And Lieberman has been as blank as an actual Republican when pressed for what his plan would entail.
In the 2006 primary, Lieberman insisted he “can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance.” Now that the country is making its first meaningful step in that direction, he can’t even get his wrinkly ass out of the way.

And don’t think it doesn’t affect Connecticut to have a senator who’s continually tempting a party with a supermajority to obliterate him. The Navy’s submarine base in Groton has been suggested as one project that may get its funding cut if Senate Dems finally go gangster on Lieberman.

Carting Moldy Joe off to somewhere as frigid and frightening as the modern Republican caucus seems more than called for by now. But the real punishment will come in November 2010 when Connecticut voters come out to take more than his committee assignments and pork projects.  

According to Research 2000, 58 percent of state residents support the public option. According to the last Quinipiac poll, only 38 percent of them support Joe Lieberman.

That’s something to think about, Joe.