It's not so, you know…

What's wrong with this NYT headline?

Lieberman’s Iraq Stance Brings Widening Split With His Party

Simply that the split between Lieberman and most Democrats on defense and foreign policy issues has been a wide one all along. He was, after all, elected by running to the right of Lowell Weicker, who held the seat as a Republican. So why would anyone imagine that he was ever represented a meaningful strain of Democratic thought? Well, there's this…

Five years after running as the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket and a year after his own presidential bid…

Yep, blame Al. He elevated Joe Lieberman from an annoying back bencher to an apparent Party leader, emboldened him to make his own run and created the media's go-to guy whenever the impulse to embarrass Democratic leader's with a dissenting quotation of two grips them.

The split has always been there, of course. That's just one reason that Joe Lieberman was so resoundingly rejected by the Democratic rank and file when he tried a national campaign under his own name. The only reason anyone might imagine otherwise would be Al Gore's foolhardy attempt to present himself as even more right-wing than his old boss Bill, almost as right wing as his Presidential opponent, Bob Dole. To some degree, Joe Lieberman is simply one of the less attractive by-products of Clintonian triangulation.

I'm all about the big tent. There's room for Joe Lieberman over there on the right side, just under the drip line. But he's not one of our leaders, and never has been, there's always been a split, and, I imagine, always will be.