SEMANTICS AND PEDANTICS. Joe Lieberman pretty clearly said that Obama doesn't put his country first -- "Between one candidate, John McCain, who has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get things done, and one candidate who has not" -- which is a sentiment that is uncontroversial in a college libertarian bull session, but highly offensive in a Presidential contest -- and Don Surber says, as they always do, that liberals are silly, but adds, perhaps for purposes of page length, a metaphor ex machina:

Ever have a bad tooth?

I have. There comes that time when you bite on it just so, it hurts like heck.

Liberals have a bad tooth that I will call, for the sake of this post, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

Lieberman hit the liberal bad tooth yesterday.

This mangled bit of wordplay pays tribute to the example of Dean Wormer in Animal House ("The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me"). Or maybe Surber's point is that, like teeth, Lieberman and liberals have many similarities, and are animated by the same forces, but underneath liberals are rotten.

In any case it's better than his actual defense:

I parse it as saying put the country first in legislation, which is not questioning one’s patriotism but rather a common parliamentary elocution; we must put our country first, and compromise on campaign reform. McCain has reached out across the aisle many, many times. Obama hasn’t.

Similarly, when I say that Don Surber eschews liberal ideas and is not a heterosexual, I mean that he prefers to keep with his own intellectual kind, and not that he is a big gay guy who likes to have sex with men.

He does get points, though, for using the idea of a "screaming" toothache in the traditional association of liberals and screaming. It's so elegant I tend to think he cooked the whole essay up just to use it.