Minstrel shows?

Um, when did openly racist attacks become, not just acceptable but fashionable (TimeBull$hit)?

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.

The spector of Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters has been invoked throughout Lamont's campaign. I wonder why those two figures are so frightening to people like David Brooks and Joe Lieberman.

And, leaving racism aside, democracy itself may be too dangerous to be left in the hands of...voters?

And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

I was among a quarter of a million Connecticut Democrats who went to the polls on Tuesday, and after a high profile campaign, thoughtfully chose someone we felt would be more attuned to our interests and would be more likely to defend our values against a Republican machine that views any compromise as capitulation. We weren't voting for Al Sharpton. We were voting against Joe Lieberman. We were voting for Ned Lamont. We were voting against the "stay the course" program in Iraq. We were voting for refocusing on defending our nation against real enemies, not invented ones.

At the same time, Republicans began a concerted effort to use Mr. Lieberman’s defeat to portray Democrats as weak on national defense, reprising a theme that they made central to the last two national campaigns.

The attacks came in searing remarks from, among others, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage “al Qaeda types.”

“It’s an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy,’’ Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview with news service reporters.

The Lieberman-McCain party. My god. Can you imagine Dick Cheney saying that about John McCain?