Joe Conason:

“Although Al Gore’s …endorsement of Howard Dean must be disturbing news for all of the front-runner’s rivals, it will strike most sharply at Joe Lieberman. John Kerry also badly wanted and needed the endorsement of Gore, who nearly selected the Massachusetts senator as his running mate in 2000.

…(S)omeone will probably ask Gore why he assured the nation three years ago that Lieberman was the Democrat best qualified to serve in the Oval Office should any exigency befall President Gore — but is today less worthy of voter support than the former governor of Vermont.

If the former vice president were to answer candidly, he might admit that his own politics have shifted since 2000, when the experience of losing the presidency he had won seems to have changed him radically. The most obvious evidence of this change during the past year came in his powerful speeches against the war in Iraq and the erosion of civil liberties. A related signal is his close and continuing cooperation with MoveOn.org, which sponsored those speeches.” —Salon