As any Mafia watcher knows, when a family member commits an act of betrayal, out of self-interest, stupidity, jealousy or greed, eventually he must pay the price. And since the betrayer is family, any Sopranos or Godfather fan will tell you, justice may take years and the timing and location must be well-planned. Luckily for Joe Lieberman, politics is less violent than the mob, but for Joe, the time has come. And while most progressives want his head for support of the Bush administration's Iraq war, his true betrayal was far more devastating and happened a long time ago.

The night was Oct. 5, 2000. The night the Democrats lost the 2000 election. The night that every Democratic fault of the last 20 years -- timidity, naiveté, chumminess with power, lack of emotion and policy wonkishness -- was on full view. The night when Joe Lieberman betrayed his party and his country by choosing to protect his self-image as a gentlemanly politician, instead of warning America that the man sitting across the table was a dangerous and unprincipled man. The night when Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman had their one and only prime-time debate for vice president of the United States.

Joe Lieberman knew. It was the only night that Americans were going to see, hear or learn about Dick Cheney. And while Dick Cheney had a long career in Washington -- 11 years in Congress, secretary of defense for the first President Bush and chief of staff for Gerald Ford -- to the man on the street he was a blank page.

Joe Lieberman knew. Anyone who was anyone in Washington knew. There was a long record of controversial votes, private sector decisions, and neocon policy papers from which Joe could have chosen. During the first Bush administration, Cheney and his neocon gang were even known as "the crazies" around the Beltway. We have now seen the results.

Joe Lieberman knew. It has always been the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate to wield the hatchet and keep the presidential candidate above the fray. It was Joe's job to go for the jugular -- especially in light of Dick Cheney's' cleverly constructed persona as the grandfatherly, unassumingly reasonable old man. Dick's low-key style concealed a ruthless, uncompromising, hard-edged conservative. It was absolutely essential to Gore, the campaign and viewers at home that Joe stand on his chair and shout to the rafters that Dick Cheney was a dangerous man.

But Joe was only thinking about Joe. And nothing is more important to Joe than to show the world what a reasonable, mature, thoughtful and gentlemanly politician he is.

Revisiting that night is to relive a left-of-center political nightmare. The press was in major sucker mode and celebrated the "civilized" proceedings. AP characterized the night as a "gentlemanly debate of campaign understudies." Jack Tapper at Salon.com said "two candidates show their younger bosses how to keep it clean." The San Francisco Chronicle called the debate a "civil and cerebral conversation." Translation -- total victory for the Bush campaign and not even a paper cut for Dick Cheney. Thanks, Joe.

It's not surprising that Joe Lieberman has been defended of late by David Brooks of the New York Times. In a recent column on the "liberal inquisition" of Joe Lieberman, David describes Joe as a "heterodox politician who distrusts ideological purity, who rebels against movement groupthink, who believes in bipartisanship both as a matter of principle and as a practical necessity."

But I have a different categorization for David and his pal Joe. They are not "heterodox" -- they are "rational elitists." A "rational elitist" revels in the gray area and the long view, sees both sides of virtually every issue, never gets angry enough to "blow his or her top," hates shouting and recognizes, as the mature and wise fellows they know they are, that compromise and slow change are the realities of the world. They are "elitists" because their acute self-knowledge, wise and thoughtful ways allow them to continually look down on those of us who just can't seem to control our anger and frustration at the injustice, greed and moral compromises we see around us.

Twenty million working poor? David says the economy is doing just fine, thank you. Wal-Mart? While I may fume every time I think of the five $20 billion Walton heirs walking past an employee with no health insurance, a "rational elitist" like David Brooks sees a booming business and marvels at all of the good products Wal-Mart sells. Forty million uninsured? Heck, in the Middle Ages no one had health insurance. So Joe Lieberman finds a way to cozy up to the big pharmaceutical companies.

Rational elitists are never poor, so they can take the long view because they have health insurance, good paying jobs and probably don't have many personal friends dying in Iraq. It is not their life that is being destroyed. Of course, compromise is necessary and things take time to change, but just as every conspiracy theorist sees the world through a prism of paranoia, the rational elitist is pathologically committed to the finding the middle ground, the bipartisan approach and the long view.

So Joe doesn't see the corruption of his Washington political bedfellows and institutions. When he looks around the Senate chamber he sees a roomful of reasonable men, making reasonable compromises in an imperfect world. It is no coincidence that one of the rare times Joe did actually get all "hot-and-bothered" was not over stem cell research, earmarks, campaign-finance reform or the minimum wage -- it was Bill Clinton's sexual escapades. It makes perfect sense really -- because Bill was giving Democratic politicians a less than holy image -- and self-image comes first and foremost to Joe. For Joe, being the gentleman trumps all.

So on that fateful night in October, when debate host Bernard Shaw asked about racial profiling, Joe could have used his time to talk about the Republican Party's long history of capitalizing on racism and Dick Cheney's horrendous Congressional record on race -- from his characterizing Nelson Mandela and the ANC as a terrorist organization to his vote against a holiday for Martin Luther King.

When Bernard Shaw asked about public education, Joe could have reminded the public Dick Cheney voted against creating the Department of Education and Head Start. When asked about the American working woman, Joe could have reminded viewers Dick voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, and when asked about the RU-486 drug, Joe could have reminded viewers Dick Cheney was so extreme on abortion he even opposed federal funding for abortions in the case of rape and incest! But not our Joe.

It went on and on. He let Dick off the hook on the environment by failing to mention Cheney opposed the refunding of the Clean Water Act. Joe's only comments about Halliburton was about Dick's salary, and nothing was said about Cheney's Congressional vote against legislation requiring birth defects caused by oil and chemical companies be placed in the public record. The "well" that Joe could have drawn from was very, very deep. The public heard none of it. At one point in the debate, our "rational elitist" recites a long list of Republicans he has worked with over the years, ending with the prophetic "If I go on much longer, I'm going to get in trouble with my own party".

Here is David Brooks recently on Joe Lieberman -- "Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men." Here is Joe Lieberman on Dick Cheney on Oct. 5, 2000 -- "I have great respect for Dick Cheney. I don't agree with a lot of things he said in this campaign, but I have great respect for him. He was a distinguished secretary of defense. And I don't have anything negative to say about him."

Rational elitists just don't get it. For those fawning words alone Joe, you just gotta go.

Any sports fan knows that a retooled team may win a few more games, but if the competition has also ramped up, the end result is the same. In 2004, in the weeks leading up to the November election, liberals and Democrats were patting themselves on the back for their major increases in voter registration and field organizing -- only to be shocked at the even stronger turnout produced by the better-organized Republican effort.

You know the result. Did it feel like progress? Hardly. But people forget. Air America was on the air for six months, Daily Kos was raising lots of money for candidates, MoveOn.org was a force, Michael Moore was smashing box-office records, Al Franken was at the top of the bestseller list along with other Bush-bashing tomes. And the result: Kerry was  "Swift Boated," and an  AWOL president was portrayed as a strong Commander-in-Chief. Progress?

Yes, with Air America, we have entered the talk radio ballpark. On the web,  we seem to have a small edge in the blogosphere similar to the edge held in circulation of left-of center magazines and books. I'm bullish on web TV, but each new medium has always predicted the demise of the previous one -- movies were going to kill radio, as TV was going to kill the movies, etc.

And market penetration is always slower than we think. Thirty years later, and the top ten cable shows average between two and four million viewers; those numbers would translate to instant cancellation on ABC, CBS and NBC. 

It's the mainstream media, stupid. Mostly it's TV. Swift Boating was a TV phenomenon, accomplished primarily on broadcast and cable news programs. We are being lulled into a false sense of accomplishment because mainstream news media has supposedly "awakened" to Iraq and Katrina -- as if they could ignore dead bodies floating past the camera in an American city. But Katrina was apolitical, and didn't require a stand on any issue other than incompetence. Bush and company have so thoroughly fouled up Iraq, not to mention their falsified claims to start the war, that it is easy to think that things have turned around.

But rest assured, the same defeatism that feeds our media strategy will have us firmly in our role as "Linus" -- having the football pulled out from under us, once again -- in '08. We will be shocked when the mainstream media fawns all over "straight-talkin'" McCain and his tough as nails, 9/11 superhero VP Rudy Giuliani.  In my opinion, Hillary will be eaten alive with under-the-radar attacks on personal vulnerabilities, as well as the  basic misogyny embedded in corporate media and its advertisers. Just watch.

Unless progressives wake up and face hard truths about media � and the money, strategy and tactics it will take � we will continue to win battles and lose the war. Progressives have essentially given up on center stage -- broadcast and cable news  -- and stayed in the comfortable terrain of  alternative media, given up on leveraging our "buying power" and mostly come to believe that the non-profit road is the only road to editorial integrity.

This allows corporations to have their cake and eat it too; as if progressives are still the back-to-the-country, anti-automation, communal-living hippies of the sixties and not the Starbucks-drinking, iPod carrying, SUV-driving people many of us really are.

So we run off to the alternative media hills preparing to wait the ten years till web-video reaches parity with broadcast. We live in the rarified world of non-profit funding, and leave billions of ad dollars and venture capital money on the table. We run "media reform" conferences steeped in policy, but void of creativity and  absent of people who could greenlight any media projects.

Progressive investors, hardest to criticize because they do so much, are loath to change directions and fund media -- even though they know that GE, Viacom and News Corp. are crushing the things they believe in and spend tens of millions on.   There is plenty of dough among wealthy liberals  -- billions -- and yet we prefer to blame Rupert.  Much of the political funding for media spending  takes place in back rooms and in secret because the same progressive press that should be shining a light, is begging for cash.

How long are liberals going to let Maytag advertise on right wing Michael Savage's radio show, and shun Air America -- without doing anything? We wash our clothes too.

In the cause of full disclosure, for the past year I have been pitching a weekly progressive newsmagazine show for cable with a former cable-news president on board as Executive Producer. In a country evenly split between red and blue, with 168 hours of very profitable Fox News programming on cable each week, this should be a no-brainer. But I can't get to first base.

In his article "New Success for Progressive Media," also up today on AlterNet, Don Hazen frames a mostly positive view of the emerging media battles won, and what we need to move forward. In a rather different tone, I've laid out what I think has to change for big victories. Together, I hope they make a lot of sense.

As the debate rages over pre-war intelligence, the work of UNMOVIC, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection team that carried out WMD inspections and reviewed the 12,000 page "Iraq Declaration," is rarely discussed. December 7, 2005 marks the third anniversary of the declaration, and its submission is central to the discussion about how the Bush administration led the country to invade Iraq.

Critics are unearthing, almost on a daily basis, evidence of pre-war intelligence that challenged the existence of WMDs hidden by the administration. But in the months leading up to the war, UNMOVIC was publicly providing daily reports and regular briefings on WMD inspections -- information that was neither fixed nor hidden. The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that included Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin read these reports and at first shifted their claims to emphasize mobile chemical labs and underground facilities. But as each day passed, and their rationale for war became less and less plausible, the WHIGs realized they were racing the truth to war.

Led by Hans Blix, UNMOVIC was given 45 days after the adoption of Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002 to resume inspections, but quickly completed their first inspection in 19 days. Hans Blix, an old hand at WMD inspections in Iraq, had a team at the ready. His first stop in Baghdad, after a four year absence, was the Canal Hotel, where he re-opened the dusty offices belonging to UNSCOM United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that had been sealed awaiting the resumption of inspections in 1998.

Resolution 1441 was meant to give Iraq a "final opportunity" to comply with the disarmament foreseen in Resolution 687 in 1991 and Resolution 1284 in 1999. Resolution 1441 called for "immediate, active and unconditional cooperation" and included the ability to make inspections anytime, anywhere, without announcement -- including presidential palaces. The resolution gave UNMOVIC the right to "request names of personnel currently or formerly associated with Iraq's programme for WMD and missiles" and remove them and their families from Iraq for interviews, if necessary.

Their first preliminary assessment of Iraq's 12,000-page Declaration came in a briefing on December 19th to the Security Council. Reaction was mixed. I spoke with Hans Blix in preparation for this article about the 12,000 page declaration and he recounted how the Iraqis complained about "disproving the negative." In retrospect, he suggested 30 days was not nearly enough time for Iraq to fully describe their entire petrol-chemical and industrial infrastructure.

But Hans Blix also had no illusions. As he reported "during the period 1991-98, Iraq submitted many declarations called full, final and complete. Regrettably, much in these declarations proved inaccurate or incomplete or was unsupported or contradicted by evidence." Blix found much of the document a rehash and re-submission of previous materials and lacking the supportive evidence that he and UNMOVIC considered essential to support Iraq declarations that no WMD's existed. While the Iraqis had become fully cooperative with regard to prompt and immediate access to sites -- anywhere at anytime, they were still playing a game of cat and mouse with respect to supporting documents -- the budgets, destruction records, transportation notes and personnel lists that could answer open questions about anthrax programs, VX and other weapons.

The December 19 report to the Security Council mentions an allocation of $32 million. Hans Blix was quick to point out that UNMOVIC had limitless funds, "hundreds of millions if necessary," and was just getting up to speed. Part of the resolution included a seven percent share of funds from the now discredited Oil for Food funds. Biologists, chemists and other inspectors were taking refresher courses and engaging in mock inspections. Airplanes were on the tarmac, and UNMOVIC was ready to hit the ground running.

After 60 days, in the January 27, 2003 briefing to the Security Council, Hans Blix reported that "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance -- not even today -- of the disarmament that was demanded of it." There were still major issues -- from an accounting discrepancy of 6,500 chemical bombs, to the discovery of 122mm chemical rockets, to the lack of convincing evidence for the destruction of 8,500 liters of anthrax, to a refurbished missile production infrastructure, to the slow release of personnel lists.

But there was good news. The UNMOVIC staff now had 260 members from 60 countries and an "inspection apparatus that permits us to send multiple inspection teams every day all over Iraq, by road or air," Blix affirmed. Three hundred inspections of over 230 sites were completed, eight helicopters in use, and advanced chemical and biological analytical facilities were recently installed in Baghdad. The German government was sending unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles and experts to run them. New Zealand was contributing medical and communication teams. New experts were being trained in Vienna.

The WHIGs couldn't have been pleased. Dick Cheney, Mary Matalin and Karl Rove are nothing if not shrewd. And the thought of a UN sponsored, internationally staffed, technologically advanced inspection team in place throughout Iraq was a bane to conservatives and not their vision of foreign policy. It could threaten their ultimate goal of regime change. As each day passed, the chances of finding huge stockpiles and weapons facilities diminished. Their argument for invasion would disappear. The clock was working against them.

On February 14th, UNMOVIC reported to the UN that 200 chemical and 100 biological samples had been analyzed and concluded that "the results to date have been consistent with Iraq's declaration." Inspections were conducted without notice and full cooperation -- "industrial sites, ammunition depots, research centers, universities, presidential sites, mobile laboratories, private houses, missile production facilities, military camps and agricultural sites .... At certain sites, ground-penetrating radar was used to look for underground structures or buried equipment." In a word -- thorough.

For the first time, Hans Blix included a section on "intelligence" in his briefing, discussing the role of foreign intelligence on the inspection process and Colin Powell's now infamous speech of February 5, 2003 to the United Nations. Hans Blix politely acknowledged intelligence agencies must protect sources and methods, and be assured information provided will be handled in the strictest confidence. He stated, "UNMOVIC had achieved good working relations with intelligence agencies and the amount of information provided has been gradually increasing."

Gradually increasing? The world was preparing to go to war and countries were holding intelligence back? Hans Blix explained in a follow up interview last week that foreign intelligence was only provided to Dimitri Perricos, his successor at UNMOVIC, and the deputy in charge of inspections at the time, along with another senior executive at the agency. Blix estimated "all in all about 100 sites suggested from all intelligence agencies together and that some three dozen actually were visited in the months we were present in Iraq." Blix referred me to the Butler Report, which closely examined the role of British intelligence. The British had given UNMOVIC 30 pieces of intelligence, which related 19 different sites. The report states UNMOVIC visited seven sites and found Volga engines (long-range missile components) at one, nuclear scientific documents at another and conventional ammo at a third. In Blix's recollection, UNMOVIC only made findings at three sites provided by intelligence, "the conclusion from Butler would be that all three were British and none was from the US."

I followed up with Dimitri Perricos last week, who confirmed that UNMOVIC was only able to follow-up on 40% of the sites provided by intelligence before the war began, but emphasized these searches were not random, and as logic would dictate, focused on credible and high-priority sites first. He would not reveal what percentage of the intel sites were provided by the US government.

Ninety days into the inspection process in 2003, and troops had started amassing at the Iraqi border. Was the threat of war working to improve the Iraqis cooperation with Blix's inspection process? Absolutely. But going from threat to war is a huge step. One has to assume the administration was feeding UNMOVIC every morsel of intelligence they had as the war got closer.

If Donald Rumsfeld knew "exactly" where the weapons of mass destruction were located, he would want them unearthed before an invasion. It would be immoral and insane to leave known weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's hands and then attack, putting the troops at risk. Why hold any intelligence back if it could reveal a site and confirm the argument for war?

There is only one possible explanation. The WHIGs knew the intelligence was coming up empty, had no more intelligence to provide UNMOVIC and needed to act. To this day Hans Blix says he does not know whether there were other weapons sites he was not told about.

After 90 days and hundreds of inspections, what would the "conservative" approach have been? In early March French Mirage aircraft were scheduled to join the inspection effort and German drones were ready to go. Millions of dollars in equipment was arriving in Cyprus and the Russians were offering an Antonov aircraft with night vision capabilities. As Blix reported, UNMOVIC was "still expanding its capabilities" with new experts "from 22 countries, including Arab countries" ready to join the effort.

On March 7, 2003, UNMOVIC gave the last briefing before the start of the war. Hans Blix continued to complain about the lack of supporting documents provided by Iraq. UNMOVIC had investigated US claims of mobile biological trucks and underground facilities, found no evidence of their existence and were ready to double the search effort with their unlimited budget. Disposal sites of VX missiles were being re-excavated; private interviews were finally beginning in earnest. Hans Blix stated in the briefing, "Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyze documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months." A "work programme" was scheduled to be delivered on March 18th 2003 that would outline UNMOVIC's "proposed list of key remaining disarmament tasks." UNMOVIC was evacuated on the day the document was delivered. The war started the very next day.

Forget Joe Wilson, Colin Powell, Ahmad Chalabi and Curveball. Simply look, as they say, at the facts on the ground. After 700 go-anytime inspections at over 500 go-anywhere sites, many actually suggested by US intelligence sources, it's proof positive that the WHIGS were not interested in reality as they made their case for war.

As Hans Blix told me, "The results should have told them the intelligence was not that good." He was being kind. No, Cheney and the WHIGs knew their intel was bad, WMDs and huge weapons programs a distant memory and their publicly stated reason for going to war, fading fast. Before the inspection team could reach full strength, before offices in Basra could be opened, before hundreds of Iraq-personnel interviews could take place, before Russian night-vision aircraft could arrive, before a work program could be delivered, before the 12,000 page Iraq Declaration could be fully vetted, before a mere 100 days of inspections could be completed, the plug was pulled and the best solution for dealing with Iraq's WMD threat ended.