No one in the Democratic party has any right to say that they are surprised by the garbage that Joe Lieberman is pulling. A lot of people are bandying around the word “betrayal”. But betrayal is a word you can use only when you have some reason to be surprised by the action in question.

Back in 2006, when he was defeated in the primary by Ned Lamont, Lieber-manchild essentially stood up and made a public-service announcement. “Look, everyone!”, he said, “I have no bloody principles at all! And I certainly don’t give a tinker’s damn about the blessed party.”

Joe Lieberman is a mean, petty, vindictive man, smaller than the smallest politician who ever crawled the halls of Congress. He’s a worthless piece of crap. And he made that crystal clear in 2006.

And the Democratic party leadership — honorable men, all, of course — nodded to themselves sagely, and to each other, and agreed that he was just the man we need to encourage and support and reward.

So Lieberman is now rewarding the party for that piece of political sagacity. Not just the party, but — in the vastness of his generosity — all Americans. Especially the ones who will lose their jobs because the businesses that employ them are forced to scale back or shut down due to the crippling burden of over-escalating healthcare costs. And the ones whose lives will be shattered by medical bankruptcies. And the ones who will die if health insurance reform does not bring them health insurance coverage.

This thoroughly devout man — who scrupulously observes the Sabbath but is willfully bind to any notion of moral imperatives — doesn’t have any qualms whatsoever about boning thousands of Americans in the ass with a sharpened broomstick dipped in Tabasco in order to get his spiteful little moment of triumphant revenge against liberals for choosing Ned Lamont over him in the the 2006 Senate primary. He is so singlemindedly focused on getting his revenge that he simply doesn’t care what the collateral damage is. Matt Yglesias came up with a phrase that should become inseparable from Joe Lieberman’s name: sociopathic indifference.

(In case anyone’s looking for explanations as to why this pathetic little turd is so twisted up inside with malice and indiscriminate hate, you might consider “middle name syndrome”. Here’s his ugly little secret: Joseph Isadore Lieberman.)