Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman joined Hugh Hewitt earlier this afternoon, and Hugh played for him the offending comments from fellow Senator Chuck Schumer on the floor of the Senate yesterday.  Here is the audio of that segment, and here is the full transcript.  Senator Lieberman was very clear in his reaction. 

HH: I know he’s your friend, but Chuck Schumer had some extraordinary remarks to make on the Senate floor yesterday. Let me give you a slice of them. 

JL: Yeah. 

CS: The violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes, we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves. 

HH:  Senator Lieberman, despite the surge… 

JL: Yeah. 

HH: …and the inability of American soldiers? It sounds like he’s blasting our troops as ineffective and failures. 

JL: Yeah, I noted that, and as we say in the Senate, with all respect to my colleague from New York, I just, I couldn’t disagree with him more. In some senses, it’s an insult to the American troops. And look, beyond that, because the American troops don’t insult easily, this is just factually wrong. I mean, what’s happened in Anbar is unbelievable. I was there in early June, I had been there six months before, and you know, John McCain and I were there together. We wanted to go into Ramadi, and they wouldn’t let us go in, because it was unsafe. This time, I went in, walked around to the markets, stopped and got some ice cream with a bunch of kids. I mean, it was, thank God, very different. And the reason that happened is one, in my opinion, the surge, because the increase in Marines in Anbar Province said to the Iraqis, most of whom are Sunni in that province, okay, the Americans are not turning tail and leaving. Second, they saw what al Qaeda was doing. They saw that these people are fanatics and killers and their enemy,  and they decided if the Americans are willing to stay here and help us a little bit, they’re really much more on our side than al Qaeda is. And of course, they’re right. So it was, it was in fact the bravery of the American troops which encouraged the Sunnis to begin to take, the tribes to take on al Qaeda. And the story is really the most encouraging thing that’s happened in Iraq in a long time, and not in spite of our troops, but in fact because of them.