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Remember the diner incident at Ted’s?  And the loud guy who kept shouting at Ned Lamont so that he could not speak with people who had shown up to his event to meet him and discuss the issues important to them? 

There is an old trick in politics where you send an operative to make an ass of himself, to provoke an equally jackass-y response from your opponent, which you then use to denounce him publicly by taking the provoked response and making your opponent into a caricature of his or her true self.

You saw the media do that to Howard Dean, by taking out all the background noise sound and feeding only the sound from his microphone into the clip of "the scream."  (Well, actually, I’ve heard that it was a bunch of GOP operatives who fed that edited tape to several media outlets…but I digress.)  And in this instance, you have an imported KStreet pal of Joe Lieberman’s, who planted himself in a diner and tried to get a rise out of Ned Lamont.

Except it didn’t work, because Ned has too much character and too much class to rise to the bait from an idiot with a hot temper.  But the KStreet fella?  Well, CTBob caught up with him, this time at a Greenwich event for Ned Lamont, and CTBob has the encounter on tape:

The other trick in politics is to know at all times when a camera or a microphone is near enough to you to pick up what you are saying or how you are acting.  Ooops.  And you never, ever want to yell at someone who buys ink by the barrel…I’m just saying. 

Clearly, this has become personal for Mr. Goodstein.  Understandably so if he is friends with Joe Lieberman and thinks that his friend is going to lose the primary.  But also because, as a lobbyist, his bottom line may be impacted if his good friend Joe Lieberman is out of office.

The DC beltway has become so intertwined with politicians, politicians’ wives who double as campaign staffers or lobbyists or other levels of influence (just look no further than the Wives’ Club from the Abramoff investigation), to political staffers rotating in and out of KStreet, to the lobbying firms who drive campaign donations in exchange for favors, to the Beltway media who see all of this going on but only a few of them bother to give it coverage, perhaps because it has become such a "normal" part of Washington life that they don’t even see it any longer.

It’s time to clean up the mess — one politician at a time.  Electing Ned Lamont is an awfully good start. 

As Matt Stoller says, Goodstein is speaking with a journalist — not a blogger, not a Lamont supporter, but a news reporter, when his temper flares.  What’s up with that?!?  They call us bloggers angry?  Nah, we’re just disgusted by what passes for politics these days…but maybe folks in the media ought to be asking themselves why a DC lobbyist would spend time in Connecticut yelling at one of their own for asking a simple question, because I bet THAT would make a helluva story for anyone who wanted to do a little digging on it.

Matt Stoller has much more on this incident at MyDD, including a second video.

(And for more Saturday amusement, check out Bob Geiger’s cartoon selections.  Classic!)

UPDATE:  If you can’t make it to CT, but you are interested in making some calls in support of Ned Lamont, Moveon.org has put together a way for you to do just that!  Check this out…  (And, thanks to Urban Pirate for the reminder about this link.)

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