Joe Lieberman is insane

There's no other way to put it: Joe Lieberman has lost whatever tenuous grasp on reality he once had.

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous [!!!] than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

Two theories there: That al Qaeda is at least as evil as the Nazis, and that it is probably more dangerous than Soviet Communism. Is there anything - anything at all - that you could say to justify these statments?

First off, the idea of making an "evil metric" reminds me of the Jon Stewart line - "What we need is an evil tie-breaker! I propose each contestant be given a commercial deli slicer. And a basket of puppies!" Even if we take the statement at face value, I think you'd be hard pressed to make the argument that some guys in caves are a worse evil than the criminal organization (as the Nuremberg tribunals described the Nazi Party) that systematically razed vast swaths of Europe, and waged a kind of warfare that would have made Genghis Khan blanch.

But it's the Soviet remark that is truly bizarre. The Soviet Union, for those who (like Sen. Lieberman) have forgotten, kept tens of thousands of nuclear warheads ready to utterly destroy America, Western Europe, and their allies for decades. Bin Laden wishes he had one percent of one percent of the Soviet Union's power.

Call it the Moment Fetish: Lieberman and his fellow travellers desperately, feverishly want to believe that they live in the most important era in human history. This makes them spew the most ridiculous crap imaginable, just to feel better.

Seriously, is it just a baby boomer thing? Do guys like Lieberman just wake up every morning wishing they'd amounted to half of what their parents' generation did? (Lieberman was born in 1942, so I guess he doesn't quite count, but he's still "young" enough to carry this baggage.)

Al Qaeda and terrorism more broadly are serious threats, no doubt about it. But to compare them to the world-ending terror of the Cold War is grossly stupid. On the best day bin Laden will ever have (Sept. 11, 2001, in case you're wondering) he was still nowhere near as powerful as the Soviets. Nevertheless, recent events have shown that bin Laden and his compatriots can still feed off of the fear of an attack - fear that Liberman is now deliberately inflaming for his own small ends. This is worse than petty, it's dangerous. All it does is give aid and comfort to the very people Joe claims to want to defeat.