No, no pictures of my pet senator Joe bathing himself and playing with yarn. I just wanted to add something to the incredibly enormous anti-Joe cacophony building in gleeful anticipation of his potential demise.

Atrios, commenting on rumors that Joe is expecting to be offered SecDef in the Bush administration, says:

…consider what it would mean if he expected to do so after the November elections. It would mean that Joe would be deliberately handing his Senate seat over to a Republican – the governor is a Republican, after all, and would appoint a replacement until the special election. If Joe were running for re-election knowing that he was going to dance into the SecDef job soon afterwards that would, in fact, be his greatest betrayal.

(Emphasis mine)

I want to talk about that for a second. Now, Atrios is no slouch and he’s absolutely right that this would be a monumental betrayal. But Joe’s greatest? Well, it depends on whether or not you think The Sword in the Stone was better before or after the 1959 revisions.

As other, more-powerful-in-the-force bloggers have noted, there’s a weird insistence among centrist democrats that Joe, whatever us crazy leftist bloggers may think of him, is actually a nice guy. There’s furthermore a strong tendency among Joe Fans to insist that he’s a good democrat and that he was a loyal Gore ally during their presidential run.

Some of them even imply (or state outright) that if Joe goes free agent after next week’s primary, forces a three way election and ends up helping the Republicans to squeeze in an upset victory, the fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars, but in Ned Lamont. you know, instead of with Joe, who refuses to accept the will of his constituents and support the winner. Because Joe, being nice, is somehow not being disloyal to his party, or if he is, it’s the first time.

What I want to ask these people is: Were you paying attention in 2000? I’ve been pissed off at Joe since the 2,000 election. And not because of his pathetic behavior during the coup, but because he pulled the ultimate sell-out of Gore – he refused to relinquish his senate seat and ran, simultaneously, for both the presidency and the senate.

But that’s not the worst of it. As Atrios says, if Joe were to do what rumors are claiming, it would be a Betrayal. But, to explain my reference to The once And Future Kingt it would also be a remake of an older betrayal, because Joe’s done it before.

Who was governor of Connecticut in 2000? John G. Rowland.

Connecticut isn’t a right wing state now and it certainly wasn’t in 2000. But like now, they had a republican Governor.

If Joe was half the man his supporters claim he is, he would have supported another Democrat to take his seat. With the power of his incumbency and the (arguable) momentum of his position as a VP candidate, he could have worked to help keep the seat in Democratic hands, should Gore have (rightly) won the presidency. Instead, he had it both ways – no matter what happened, Joe was going to make out regardless of Gore’s fate. However, Rowland was a republican. By running for both his senate seat and for VP, had Gore won, Joe would have handed the seat to the Republicans.

Maybe Joe doesn’t want to be SecDef. And maybe he would turn down any offer to serve in the Bush Administration. But I doubt it. Joe was perfectly willing to f-… I mean, unlovingly make love to us before. He’s been, er, unlovingly making love to us for 6 years. And he’ll keep doing it.