And why did the party "give him the boot"?

Oh yeah, that's right. Because he wasn't toeing the Democrat line.

 Joe Lieberman supports Bush's stance in the Iraq War.  The Iraq War is a big issue and that is why Democrats didnt vote for him.

Smaller issues dont matter as much for parties, such as Maine's govenor who supports women's rights, Republicans who support gay rights, Democrats who support off-shore drilling, and so forth.  These are minor issues that wont make or break an election (unless its very close).

Big voter issues are things like the Iraq War and the economy.  If you go against your party there, you have little chance of coming out of a primary.

Of all the people who have spoken for either candidates at their convention Joe Liebermanis about the only one who didn't have anything to gain personally from supporting the candidate. Believe it or not, many of the former presidential candidates (and other political figures) have spoken out in support for the current candidate because they will not be able to run for president again (or even get much support from their party in the future) if they don't ...

Joel Lieberman may have only supported John McCain because of his friendship with John McCain, but (to me) that seems about as good of an endorsement as one can get.

Edit: made mistake on name, seen it in hundreds of news stories as Joel

I think Joe Liebrman supports McCain because he is a friend.  Deep down, I believe that both Lieberman and McCain support personal freedoms, as is evident in Liberman's voting records and McCain's stances on issues before he decided to run for president in 2008.  McCain had to be more conservative to get out of the Republican primary since extreme conservatives and extreme liberals have a large say in primaries.

Both John McCain and Joe Lieberman's political aspirations have been cut short because they were too moderate and indpendent thinking, such as McCain's defeat in the 2000 Republican presidential primary and Lieberman's defeat in the Conneticut Democratic primary.

Yea, but the wider general electorate are usually not radical. So a party passing some nut thru the primary is just an excersise in self-screwing as Lieberman illustrated.

No, never like him anyways.

I think Lieberman would have been a lot better VP choice than Palin. Statistically Republicans are more likely to support a candidate through thick and thin than the Democrats are. I am not going to bring up the actual numbers on that, but if you really want them I will. I did read it offline, so that might be hard to do.

Part of the reason why is that Republicans are generally more conservative and have less problem "falling in line" with whoever is at the head of their party. Democrats tend to question authority a bit more and will not support a candidate just because their party has elected him. (The Hillary debacle is a decent example of this).

So I would have said, "Fuck the base, they will vote for me anyways cause they are that damn conservative, so I am going to try to steal away as many independents as possible. Plus Lieberman is an extremely efficient politician who is great at crossing party lines."

Personally, I've always hated Lieberman and always will.

CNN's got a piece up about him lying during his speech at the RNC. He said some weird shit.

Anyway, I think he would've been a better choice than Palin. It would've been a real maverick choice to pick an ex-democrat independent instead of a fundie with no experience.

I have (personally) never seen anything that would validate your assumptions ... In Canada the Liberals were so corrupt that they (literally) stole hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars and funneled it to their friends and yet 30% of voters will line-up to vote for them again.

As I said in another thread, in both parties there is a base of true-believers who will vote strictly on partisan lines; and had Sarah Palin been the Democrat VP Nominee and Hillary Clinton been the Republican VP Nominee you would hear a lot of Republicans bash Sarah Palin and a lot of Democrats bash Hillary Clinton.

Lieberman is one of the senators who I'd most liked to have defeated in 2006. Anyone who thnks real life violence (ie the Iraq War) is just spiffy while video game violence should be banned is someone unfit for public office. Not to mention, he's just an irritating guy. Democrats have a 51-seat majority in the Senate this year.. but in 2009, we will have picked up seats in New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico and Alaska so he will likely be stripped of his committee holdings and he can finally switch to the repub party.