Work out the Latin roots, but this interview with retiring Sen. Lieberman awakens a good deal of it in me.

I am profoundly, eternally grateful that the pious fraud at the head of the ticket he ran on never was more than a guest in the Oval Office.  Of all the fundamentally dishonest people who’ve risen to prominence in national politics in recent memory, Algore has a decent claim to be the top bottom of that heap.  Clinton was very up front about what he wanted:  He wanted to be elected and he wasn’t very shy about doing what he had to in order to get there.  He was dishonest, but in a fairly shallow, do-one-thing-say-another sort of way.  Mostly he just wanted to get laid.  Dear Leader is actually fairly up-front about what he’s about: he’s a Chicago thug politician who has spared no effort to drag this country sufficiently far down the road towards socialism that it can’t be reversed. 

But Algore, he was something special.  He was more than just blather-about-the-trees-while-annihilating-the-hydrocarbons.  He was pious, sanctimonious.  And a fraud to the very soles of his feet.  It’s not by coincidence that he started out to be a jack-leg preacher, going to divinity school for a while.

And he picked Lieberman as his running mate.  Most of the policy positions of Lieberman’s that have ever swum into my ken I’ve disagreed with, for one reason or another.  But I’m not aware that anyone has ever had the slightest reason to impugn his character or the sincerity with which he holds those positions.  If there could be some way that we could keep him around to read us a sermon every now and then, just because we need reminding, I’d like to see it done.  In the balance, I think American political life will be measurably the lesser endowed when he retires.

Fair winds and following seas, Joe.