It's not even that they lied for partisan gain during the campaign, whining about the "hacking" attack, it's that they're hiding from any accountability today, refusing even to answer reporter phone calls about it.
The U.S. attorney's office and state attorney general have cleared former U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont and his supporters of any role in the crash of U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's campaign Web site hours before last summer's Democratic primary.
"The investigation has revealed no evidence the problems the Web site experienced were the result of criminal conduct," said Tom Carson, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.
State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal confirmed the joint investigation "found no evidence of tampering or sabotage warranting civil action by my office." Both men declined to provide additional information, such as what might have happened to the site [...]
Calls to Lieberman went unanswered yesterday.
No details? Why not? Too embarrassing to note the truth of the matter is what we claimed seconds after the allegations surfaced? -- That the Lieberman campaign was on a cheapy hosting account with 70+ other sites? That they were too incompetent to keep their crappy website up and running?
Yet the steno press was too eager to parrot the Lieberman spin at the time. Like CNN's Robert Yoon on CT's primary day:
"This type of dirty politics has been a staple of the Lamont campaign from the beginning, from the nonstop personal attacks to the intimidation tactics and offensive displays to these coordinated efforts to disable our Web site," said Smith in a statement e-mailed to reporters Monday evening.
"There is no place for these Rovian tactics in Democratic politics, and we demand that our opponent call off his supporters and their online attack dogs."
Tuesday afternoon, the Lieberman campaign formally complained to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, asking him to investigate attacks on the site.
In its letter to Blumenthal, the campaign, citing joe2006.com's Web-hosting company, said the site had been brought down due to traffic "neither natural nor done by normal site visitor volume."
When asked by CNN whether the service outage was due to an unpaid bill, Sean Smith, Lieberman's campaign manager, said "Are you kidding?"(...)
The Lieberman campaign said Tuesday in a statement: "... The the suspension of displaying the Web site www.joe2006.com was not due to to an overdue account. Friends of Joe Lieberman is completely paid in full. The screen that showed yesterday is a default image from the server. In order to isolate where the denial of service attack was coming into the site, we disabled it as rapidly as possible. Once we were able to isolate all the site files for study, we were able to add an appropriate one-page maintenance message."
Will Yoon and other media outlets that reported on the "hacking" now update their stories? Don't hold your breaths.
If there's one rule of media and politics -- and this is what's truly Rovian -- is that the steno press (with a few exceptions) will uncritically parrot your talking points, smear attacks, and accusations, without you suffering the indignities of having that bullshit exposed for being the bullshit it is.
Lieberman and Dan Gerstein accomplished their mission, and they'll never have to answer for all the crap they pulled to make it happen -- from the many lies, to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in street money they spent without reporting to the FEC.