Why does "The Second Coming" come to mind?

It is insane. We need calm and rational minds. Some seemed determined to be otherwise and cause chaos.

As far as I'm concerned, along with his blatant displays of bigotry, this guys a total sociopath. The dude assaulted a 12-year-old boy for apparently hitting his own son:

The September 25, 2001 Haaretz reports (translated from Hebrew):

Lieberman acknowledged yesterday in the Jerusalem District Court that he attacked a 12 year old boy from the Tekoah settlement, who had hit his son. He was charged with assaulting and threatening him. Lieberman was convicted based on his own confession in the context of a plea bargain. His attorney asked the judges, in the context of the arrangement, to restrict his punishment to a fine [17,500 shekels] and the defendant’s promise that he will not commit such an act in the future.

The beating occured in December, 1999 at the Nokdim settlement. His son told him that three boys hit him. Lieberman located one of the boys in a trailer and hit him in the face. After the boy fell and was injured, the defendant grabbed him by the shirt-collar and arm, took him back to his parent’s home in Tekoa and threatened that he would attack him again if he returned to Nokdim.

Another article notes that the complainant received his head injury when he was thrown into a wall by Lieberman.

The article notes that one of the reasons the prosecutor accepted the plea bargain rather than pursue the matter to trial was that Lieberman’s actions were not “characteristic” of his normal behavior. I guess she momentarily forgot he’d been a nightclub bouncer in Moldova and ignored his threats of death leveled against Arab MKs semi-regularly.

Discerning minds will recall that Lieberman has already settled on who will be his number 2 at the foreign ministry: none other than his legal “fixer” in the child assault case, Dov Weisglass.

I rip on American politics, a lot, but I find Israeli politics even more bizarre.

It's a very sad day for Israel, a country established by socialist, to have a right wing racist as foreign minister. It will not help the chances of peace.

Israeli politics are actually quite similar to that of the US. This is especially true in the last 25 years when affluence took over. The left slowly disappeared, politician became more corrupt and the right wing became more extreme (Bush is not better than Lieberman).

Israel still has a very tough newspapers and have a no Village with Broders and Hiatts.

I am not sure of that, at all. Lieberman is definitely more secular, but if, hypothetically, Lieberman were elected president of the United States, his rhetoric and actions towards say, a Mexico, would have been ridiculously more extremist than Bush's. Lieberman is far more nativist and outwardly extremist than Bush could ever be, to be honest.

BTW, I'll concede that the US has nothing, nationally, that even comes close to Haaretz, but the whole thing about Israel not having a Village is kind of missing the point and obfuscatory. Israeli society largely is a Village. There are very few real political cleveages. It's a security state before anything else, and its politics and society reflect that.