Joe Lieberman’s body wasn’t even cold when the predictable avalanche of tributes to his “conscience” and “doggedly independent” streak cascaded across the media. This is certainly one way to describe the career of the former long-serving Connecticut senator, who died yesterday due to complications from a fall.

Another way is to describe him as he actually was: a fairly unremarkable Washington politician who ably filled the standard Capitol Hill role of inveterate warmonger and corporate marionette.

Besides the many, many innocent lives he helped extinguish in foreign wars he backed, Lieberman’s main achievement was managing to work as a right-wing mole within the Democratic Caucus, giving him the unique ability to undermine and sabotage the party and its leadership from the inside — and providing a model to later Democratic saboteurs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.