A short ride off into the sunset

Looks like Rape Gurney Joe is calling it a (Senate) career. It doesn't sound as if there are too many of his constituents who will be too broken up at the prospect of no longer being represented by G-Dubs' favorite-est bipartisan figleaf.

Another friend burned up her iPad tonight when I asked her to enumerate why she hates Joe Lieberman. She ticked off a half-dozen reasons and then said, "The thing is, I did not come up with most of these myself. They come from many rounds of playing the peculiar Connecticut liberal cocktail party game 'I hated Joe Lieberman before you hated Joe Lieberman.'"

Pratt & Whitney, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, however, look to be getting positively misty at the prospect of a Senate without one of their most loyal sources of taxpayer-funded profiteering:

Defense industry says Sen. Lieberman will be ‘hard to replace’

“He is a giant of the Senate, to me just as important on national security as [Sen. Edward] Kennedy [D-Mass.] was on health or [Sen. Bill] Bradley [D-N.J.] on finance or [Sen. Pete] Domenici [R-N.M.] on the deficit,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a national security analyst at the Brookings Institution. “In that regard he is very, very hard to replace."

...Lieberman cemented his favorable reputation with defense firms when he advocated for more models of combat systems like the Lockheed Martin-made F-22 fighter and the Boeing-built C-17 air lifter even when Air Force and Pentagon officials argued against them.

...Lieberman has at times teamed up with conservative Republicans like Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and former Sen. Jim Talent of Missouri in fights to maintain weapon programs that the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama wanted to terminate or overhaul.

That's Joe Lieberman: an "advocate" and a "fighter." If he can strongarm billions for defense contractors, just imagine what he can do for the average person...and keep imagining, 'cause you don't want to be in the position of having to find out:

Lieberman said he believes hospitals that refuse to give contraceptives to rape victims for "principled reasons" shouldn’t be forced to do so. "In Connecticut, it shouldn’t take more than a short ride to get to another hospital," he said.

For those keeping score: in LieberLand, the Boeings of the world won't have to worry about losing a contract just because the military doesn't want it, and violated women shouldn't worry about little things like having their rapist's baby, since it's a just a "short ride" to go hospital shopping so they can find emergency contraception. After all, what's a little road trip after a few hours of being examined, scraped, swabbed and questioned by the police? If it was really that big a deal, then maybe survivors groups should've had the foresight to pony up $140,000 in donations like United Technologies, so ol' Joe would know how concerned they are.

No wars too big to support, no victims too small to throw under the bus to pander to your cross-over GOP voters.

Don't let the door hit you, Senator.