Lieberman: vote for Ned and the terrorists win!

It's all over the netroots blogosphere, and it's not funny. As quoted in the NYT:

If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England .... It will strengthen them and they will strike again.

Yeah, it's true. It will be taken that way. By those people. The real questions (1) are the alternatives any better? and (2) who got us into that corner anyway?

The GOP, limping into the midterm elections significantly hobbled by Iraq, must be overjoyed to see the Dems' left heel slamming down to break the instep of its right, and the right heel responding by breaking the instep of its left

It might be good in the end. In the sense that Dubya uses when he says that war can clarify things. A pretty ill-time strategic exchange in this case, though, if the Dems were hoping to go into the mid-term elections with an uneasy, unity-in-relative-silence stance on Iraq.