Put Up Or Shut Up, Joe

I think Gregg Sargent is calling Holy Joe a liar when he cites all those generals achin' for a surge: 

The evidence is buried at the end of a Washington Post article about GOP division over the possibility of an escalation. It turns out GOP Senator Susan Collins went to the same meeting with these commanders that Lieberman. Here's how she characterizes these meetings to the paper:

[John] Sununu declined to say what he thinks about more troops, but one of his colleagues from the Northeast, Maine's Collins, said she was flatly opposed to the idea after discussing it with commanders and Iraqis during a trip with McCain, Graham and Lieberman.

"I don't think the addition of new American troops in a situation plagued by sectarian strife is the answer," Collins said. "I think more American troops will present more American targets."

This couldn't be clearer. Collins was in on the same discussions with the commanders that Lieberman was. And she emerged from those meetings "flatly opposed" to an escalation.

Yet Lieberman has now twice said that those conversations persuaded him of the rightness of his own call for an increase.

It's worth asking one more time: Why is Lieberman never, ever pressed by the media for his many inconsistencies and outright falsehoods on Iraq? Has a single reporter ever asked Lieberman why he's now calling for an escalation, when — as Atrios frequently points out — he said during his reelection campaign that he was "confident" that we'd be drawing down "significant numbers" of troops by now? And now that Collins has revealed that it's highly unlikely that the commanders said anything pro-escalation in those meetings with Lieberman, when will he be asked to back up his repeated claim that they're asking for more troops?

It's also worth asking if all those saps who bit down on the hook of that phony "Lieberman's website was hacked" story can work up a lukearm question in the wake of 3,000 dead.  The Courant re-ran Lieberman's WaPo op-ed piece today.  Since they did so much to convince Connecticut residents that nobody wanted the troops home more than Joe, and largely on that basis he was re-elected, might it be incumbent upon them to do a little prodding here?

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2. Memo to the Right Wing: Put Up or Shut Up
3. Lieberman on Point for Senate DADT Repeal
4. Predictable Lieberman: Covered for Life, So Others Can Wait for Health Insurance
5. “He’s With Us On Everything But The War”