Chlorophyll

Chalk up a major victory to MoveOn.org. I certainly didn't help them out at all, yet they managed to topple Gore's wouldabeen/shouldabeen Veep. I can't speak to Joe Lieberman, the man, but I certainly never liked him as a politician. I always thought he was a borderline Republican. He wasn't as bad, though, as Zell Miller. Why any Democrat so much as makes eye contact with him, I can't imagine.

Back to my point. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party has reared its head and taken down one of its own. This will inevitably cause much debate within the Democratic Party. It's not hard to predict how this will play out, though... the same damn way it does every damn time.

The progressives will make a show of force. There will be the obligatory hand-wringing. Shock waves will ripple out. Pundits will speculate about the rising tide of The Left in the Democratic Party. Much ado will be made about progressive issues -- above all, the war. The one in Iraq. The small handful of Democrats who were on the right side of this issue from the get-go (I can count them on one hand) will issue "I-told-you-so" statements which will be drowned out by vaguely and ambiguously anti-war platitudes from Dems who were eager to do what W said back when that was the popular thing to do.

And when the dust settles... we'll all be back where we started, minus Joe Lieberman. MoveOn.org will have to move on to taking down Ike Skelton, Tom Lantos, Joe Biden, Mark Dayton, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Evan Bayh, Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, and more, including, of course, Hillary Clinton. Better get moving!

In the meantime, serious progressives and serious anti-war activists will be working in and through not just anti-war candidates, but a full-blown anti-war party, the Green Party. When Dems were falling over themselves to agree with W in 2003, the Green Party called for him to be impeached.

In short, keep this in perspective: MoveOn.org has mobilized hundreds of people to campaign to get hundreds of thousands of votes cast to replace one pro-war Democrat with an anti-war Democrat on the ballot in one state. In the meantime, hundreds of anti-war Green candidates in almost every state get little press coverage or support. This is no victory for the anti-war movement. This is a benchmark for what a waste of time, and indeed a complete sham, the Democratic Party is.