Lisa Murkowski: First Successful Write-In Senate Candidate Since 1954S

And with only a few hundred write-in votes left to count, the AP calls it: Lisa Murkowski has finally defeated Joe Miller in Alaska's Senate race as a write-in candidate. Be nice to her now, Republicans: She's your Joe Lieberman.

This is a pretty historic result! The only other write-in candidate to win a full Senate term was South Carolina's Strom Thurmond in 1954, and he only did that because the Democratic nominee died two months before an election and Thurmond led a last-minute protest candidacy against the party's unpopular replacement. Before that, William Knowland won a 1946 special election for a two-month term in California, where all the candidates were write-ins. So let's give Murkowski the title of "first victorious Senate write-in candidate in non-bullshit circumstances." Ever. (Assuming you don't qualify the entirety of politics right now as "bullshit circumstances," which you do.)

So we're surprised! We suggested that Murkowski had gone "batty" back when she announced her candidacy. Anyway, this humble pie we're eating right now tastes pretty bad, as it should. But who could have predicted that Joe Miller would turn out to be enough of a lying criminal thug to actually scare away Republican voters? Lisa Murkowski, apparently!

She'll stay a Republican, but without so much pressure to conform — just like Joe Lieberman after he won his Connecticut re-election in 2006 as an independent and has ever since sought revenge against those Democrats who'd (naturally) abandoned him after he lost their primary. She's already saying in major interviews that Sarah Palin's too stupid to be president and Republican Tea Party leader Sen. Jim DeMint is a selfish good-for-nothing. But maybe Murkowski, unlike Joe Lieberman, will lose her appetite for revenge at some point in the next four years.

Anyway, now that you've lost, Joe Miller, got any more illiterate Todd Palin emails to share?

[Image via Getty]