Lieberman Campaign Blames Its Incompetence on Lamont

No, folks, that's not a headline from the Onion - that's actually what's going on. This might be the most hilarious thing that's happened in the entire Lieberman-Lamont campaign - and that's saying a lot because there's been a lot of humor. Lieberman's campaign website went down today. Lieberman's campaign staff immediately accused Lamont's campaign of hacking their website, and said it is going to file a complaint with the U.S. Attorney's Office and with the Connecticut Attorney General. But as the Wonkette shows, what really appears to have happened was that Lieberman and his $12 million campaign hired a web consultant who then hosted the Lieberman campaign's website on a $15-a-month discount server, which - not surprisingly during a high traffic time like an election - shit the bed and died under stress. Put another way, it appears Lieberman's campaign simply made a poor decision, and now facing the consequences of that poor decision, its trying to blame the whole thing on its opponent.

Lieberman campaign hack Dan Gerstein is now running around telling anyone he can that, despite the Lamont campaign's gracious and totally unncessary offer to help its opponent's campaign unshit their own bed, that no, the Lieberman bed is too soiled to unshit. Markos subsequently documented how this is, in fact, not a hack job - but a very high-profile case of the disasters that occur when incompetents like Dan Gerstein run campaigns.

Here's what seems to really be going on: the Lieberman campaign, which has long suffered from terrible management, finally felt the last consequences of a horribly run campaign: the failure of its high-priced consultants to make sure the basic electronic IT infrastructure could perform on election day. The Lamont campaign offered to rescue the Lieberman campaign from this last bit of bad management, the Lieberman campaign refused, and instead wants to use their incompetence as a way to claim the election was "stolen" if they lose. It's the best of both worlds for Joe: He gets to soil his own bed, and then use the lack of control of his faculties as a way to save his own ass.

Wow...if only Joe Lieberman had fought so hard against, say, the Iraq War or the 2000 election fiasco as he is fighting to manipulate his campaign's IT failure into a ploy to rescue his political career, maybe he would have never faced such a serious primary in the first place...

UPDATE: Wonkette is now saying the specific web hosting company it originally reported was at the center of the fiasco is not the actual web company at the center of the acutal fiasco.