There are many positives about the British political system as compared to the one we use in the US. Perfect example: in the British system, the Democrats could cast Joe Lieberman out of the party, no matter what he calls himself. Not that they would, but it would be possible.

Since JoeMentum had the last laugh, it’s particularly fun to catch ’em on the little stuff. Like when his campaign claimed that supporters of Ned Lamont had instituted a denial-of-service attack on, or DOSd, his website on the eve of the primary election.

When the Web site went down on Aug. 7, 2006, the Lieberman campaign asserted it had been hacked in “a coordinated attack by our political opponents.”

But the F.B.I. saw it another way.

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” the newspaper said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

The Lieberman campaign workers probably caused the site to crash themselves, to judge from the report. The campaign site was configured to allow only 100 e-mail messages an hour, but when that limit was exceeded many times on the day before the primary, the site crashed, according to the report.

Yet the campaign did not realize that at the time, and said it had been the target of what is known as a denial-of-service attack, in which a server is purposely crippled by a flood of data.

It all sounds reasonable to me. If I’d been a Lieberman groupie, I might have figured that he wouldn’t be a big email recipient.

But at least I would have checked the basic stuff before accusing my opponent of dirty tricks. Perhaps it’s this that keeps Lieberman at the top of the list of Democrats Republicans Love.

Just think, if Al Gore had had the run of the White House kitchen all this time, we might have been stuck with JoeMentum invading Iran.