So Joe Lieberman went down in flames last night to Ned Lamont, every progressive blogger’s favorite candidate. I don’t know anything about Ned, except that he’s not Joe, and frankly that’s more than enough for me to hope he wins. Back in 2004 I had sort of promised I wasn’t going to pay a lot of attention to US politics anymore, because it was getting stupid as hell, but Joe Lieberman strikes me as a particularly sanctimonious breed of prick, and anything that causes him professional pain and suffering is thus OK in my books.

What worries me about this is the message it’s going to send. Not, as per Time‘s suggestion, that bloggers sent the Joementum down to defeat. I don’t really care whether the dreaded Emm Ess Emm thinks bloggers and Internet activists were responsible for winning Ned Lamont his chance to run for Senate, and I care even less whether politicians themselves take that lesson home. (Blogs are good for a few things and the Internet is good as a whole for a bunch more, but if you were a smart campaigner, you already knew this (see “Dean, Howard,” for the benefits and limitations of that strategy).) No, what I worry is that bloggers themselves are going to get this idea in their heads that they can influence the outcome of elections, and we cannot have that. The idea that bloggers are going to change the nature of political discourse in western society is one of the most obnoxious memes out there, and the very last thing we need is to have more bloggers with an even bigger sense of importance.

All politics are local. We have no way of knowing why Connecticut Democrats gave Joe the ol’ heave-ho. We don’t care. But one thing’s for sure: It wasn’t because of anyone’s heroic posting.