Via Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler makes a great point about Joe Lieberman:

If you wield a congressional oversight gavel, and your buddy’s in the White House, you might just conduct exactly zero investigations into presidential wrongdoing. But when the election comes, and your other buddy loses to a guy you don’t really like, you might think about becoming a real pest to the new administration. 

I agree. Not only do I agree, I motherfucking agree. And yet I see a problem.

If we were talking about anyone besides Lieberman, I’d be discomfited by this statement. There’s a tendency in this moment of liberal euphoria to forget that Obama could very well turn out to be a shitty president — or, at the least, that he’d occasionally have to have the workings of his government explored, audited and shamed, because Republicans hardly have a monopoly on cronyism, corruption or incompetence. Oversight, to be all goo-goo about it and shit, isn’t a dirty word, and you don’t want a cheerleader in the chair of the oversight committee. That way lies Venezuelan-style great-leader-ratification from the legislature. Or, put another way, the evidence of what happens when that occurs has been on display for eight years.

But what you also don’t want in that chair is a sniveling, petty, entitled, morally overbearing and intellectually limited asshole who thinks liberals are a greater problem for the country than George Bush was or John McCain would have been. The 2012 Connecticut Senate race really can’t come soon enough.