WHY YOU DON'T CROSS A KENNEDY. Those of us who despaired of Weepin' Joe Lieberman (I-Green Room) years ago have not been surprised by anything he's done over the past six months. He's always been a puling, mewling opportunist who'd sell his grandmother to the Malay pirates for a pat on the head from a jackleg preacher, or 15 minutes of banter on Don Imus's Wrinkle Farm, where he recently made giddy fun of the demolition of the Geneva Conventions. He's never breathed a political moment in which he was not John Breaux in a hairshirt. However, what happened to him here is not to be minimized. I can't remember another time in which Senator Edward Kennedy summoned up the family iconography in order to beat another Democrat over the head with it, even a putative Democrat like Weepin' Joe who, rejected by the Democratic voters of his state, now finds himself cast out of The New Frontier by the most important member of the Membership Committee. He's had his problems, God knows, and he wouldn't have wanted me on a jury in 1969, but you simply don't futz with Ted Kennedy on the subject of his brother's legacy. And, just for fun, let those enough with enough profanity in our vocabulary imagine what Harry Truman would have said about a Democrat who failed to abide by the verdict of his party's faithful, and who seems to be perpetually on the short-list of Cabinet appointments of the most incompetent and corrupt Republican administration since Warren Harding's ticker gave out. I'd have sprung for the first bourbon-and-branch myself. -- Charles P. Pierce
