It is, I believe, a trap

While I haven't yet read anyone take Lieberman's threats seriously, this is aggravating:



The interviewer in the video takes this to be a good sign, that he seems to have some doubts about whether filibustering his own party's health care bill is such a good idea. Elsewhere, Lieberman vaguely announces that he is "inclined" to break an inevitable filibuster, but that he still "hasn't decided yet".

Again, I don't know how much there is to this, in that he is certainly able to vote to break the filibuster and then later vote against the bill if for some reason he doesn't want it on his record. It will still pass, and still help millions of Americans regardless. It seems to me that maybe he was testing the waters, seeing how much his own party was willing to bend over to keep him on board, and that, as with the AHIP study that came out earlier this week and backfired spectacularly, there was little to no bending involved.

Even if this is not the case and he really does have some deep ideological discontent with health care reform or whatever and he's not just trying to give himself some political leverage, this still seems like a remarkably dumb move. The dude is largely disliked by Democrats, the ones that vote, help run campaigns, and fork over money to the DNC. In fact, his own party rejected him in 2006. He's also on thin ice with the party leadership, as he spent all of 2008 questioning Barack Obama's ability to be as awesome as John McCain. And now, after remaining fairly quiet, he has resurfaced to throw a potential wrench in the biggest piece of Democratic legislation in decades. I can't tell whether he thinks he's taking principled stands or if he just has so much contempt for the Democratic party that he doesn't think they'll ever respond to him.