This Morning, I Hate Joe Lieberman

I will have to repent of such feelings at some later date, I know. But for now, I am allowing myself to overflow with annoyance, displeasure, and contempt.

Senator Joe Lieberman has quite possibly just killed one of the few remaining options Senate Democrats, led by Harry Reid, had left to them to forge a compromise capable of garnering 60 votes under the astonishingly undemocratic and baroque rules of our Senate, thereby making the possibility of any national reform in how medical costs are covered and distributed amongst America's poorest, youngest, and sickest citizens--the populations most likely to be uninsured and unable to get insurance, and thus the treatment of whom contributes mightily to skyrocketing health care costs--that much more less likely.

He won't stand for a compromise built around an expansion of Medicare--perhaps the most successful of all of our nation's meager social insurance programs, and the very program which Lieberman supported expanding back when he ran for vice president on Al Gore's ticket in 2000. But of course, that was a decade ago, and Joe has grown wiser more self-important since then.

Ezra Klein adds some probably uncharitable, but to my frame of mind this morning utterly appropriate, details:

Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill's failure that much more. And if there's a policy rationale here, it's not apparent to me, or to others who've interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

Allow me to shout some completely partisan curses into the cold void of this Kansas morning. Hey, it's Monday; I'm allowed to be a grouch.

Update, 12:16pm, CST: Jonathan Chait tells people like me to calm down:

[L]iberals are somewhat overreacting to Lieberman's turn against health care reform. It's true that Lieberman refused to take part in negotiations with Reid over the compromise, suggested he could support the bill presuming a positive CBO score, and then decided to stick in the knife. However, I don't think that health care reform is in peril. If Harry Reid decided to submit to Lieberman's demands, the health care bill would basically revert to what the Senate Finance Committee produced. That's still a major piece of legislation. Expectations among liberals have risen since then, so the come-down is understandable. But this isn't the end of reform. Now, the counter-argument is that Lieberman may well come up with a reason to back away from that bill as well. Given his obvious bad-faith negotiation, that's certainly a danger. But Olympia Snowe is not negotiating in bad faith, and she, unlike Lieberman, actually seems to care about health care reform. So even if you revert to something like the Senate Finance bill and Lieberman tries to stab you in the back, you can still pick up Snowe. (A fact that itself reduces the chance that Lieberman will attempt a second act of sabotage -- why try to knife health care reform if you can't kill it?)