Why does Joe Lieberman remind me of J.R.R. Tolkien's Trilogy?

Well not the whole trilogy, but one character in particular --

Wormtongue

And this was in my mind even before he came out as a turncoat...

Here's some of the description given in Wikipedia:

"Gríma, called (the) Wormtongue ... Gríma serves as an archetypal flatterer, liar, and manipulator. (The name 'Gríma' derives from the Icelandic word meaning "a mask".)"

---and it goes on:

"Tolkien describes him as "a wizened figure of a man, with a pale wise face, and heavy lidded eyes", with a "long pale tongue"...

Everyone ... called him "Wormtongue," for his malicious words were like that of a serpent... Gandalf repeatedly compares his (words) to a snake:

'"The wise speak only of what they know, Gríma son of Galmod. A witless worm have you become. Therefore be silent, and keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls."

---That last sentence should have been what another formerly brave fellow -- John McCain -- might have said if he, in turn, had not abandoned his ideals and principles for the ambitious pursuit of power.

----

"See, Théoden, here is a snake! To slay it would be just. But it was not always as it now is. Once it was a man, and it did you service in its fashion."

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That was always the sad thing about what Joey has become, that once he was brave and a devoted participant in the struggle for civil rights... but, like the comparable character in the trilogy -- Gollum -- his love for the precious destroyed his humanity.

In the Peter Jackson movies, Grima was played by Brad Dourif, who presented him perfectly as the covert, traitorous, craven bit of detritus still pretending to be an actual man...

---And the Democratic senators actually invited him back into the fold. Incomprehensibly corrupt and, like that of Grima, done for purely personal power rather than prinicples. (The Democrats needed their principles and integrity a lot more than they needed a 60-vote majority. Too bad.)