So if you want to criticize [Chris Floyd's] tone and his choice of tactics, you must first supply good reason why we have until past January 20, 2009 to effect a solution.

This is a false choice — the same one that Floyd offers in his original article. I'll make no certain claims about the possibility of war with Iran now or ever except this: for military and political reasons the Bush regime will make its best effort to start such a conflict in late winter or early spring of 2008.

The effort may be weak. It may be strong but fail because there is, at last, too much structural opposition to it. Or it may succeed, as the last one did. The outcome isn't certain.

But one thing is clear — what will determine the outcome is what we have out there now. That includes the hated Nancy Pelosi, who has just this year been given her speakership through a thin-as-straw majority in the House, and the even more hated Harry Reid, who doesn't even have a majority in the Senate unless Joe Lieberman lets him. MoveOn complained recently that still, even now, these guys in Congress don't get enough consistent messages of support for progressive positions. There's not enough organized pressure, people aren't getting the word out, there's still no overarching sense of common cause — any of a number of factors.

Let me put this more starkly. We don't have what we need for impeachment because we started too late. Period.

My objection to Chris Floyd's "with us or against us" rhetoric is that we may nevertheless, possibly, have what we need to stop the next war, consolidate a progressive caucus in Congress strong enough to pursue the crimes of the Bush regime, and eventually rebuild what we destroyed — but not if we toss the current Democratic leadership onto this Manichean bonfire simply because some of us have finally come around to seeing what's going on a little earlier than some of them have.

And just to be clear, they're not going to suddenly start kissing the anti-war movement's ass — we didn't give them power in Congress when it would have made a difference, and it's funny how they keep track of things like that. So tell them what you want, let them know that you support progressive policies and Bush impeachment — create the kind of climate that will support them in taking a stand, or which will oust them in favor of real progressives.

But if they don't hop to it quite as fast as you'd like, are you really going to let the GOP back into power in a fit of spiteful apathy? Because if so, may what follows be on your head for it, not mine.

"Amity: there are things called "links" ... from there you can research archives [of Chris Floyd's writing] ..."

Astoundingly, by some precognitive power I didn't even know I possessed, I followed Ché's instructions before even reading them — despite my total lack of understanding of the web, links, the internet, and probably electricity.

The funny thing is, I got to about 2005 and couldn't find anything earlier than that, except bibliographic references to print articles in periodicals I don't read. Maybe I'm just too stupid to navigate my way properly through the site in the time I alloted for finding Floyd's earliest writing.

Surely, I thought in my ignorance, someone who asserts with such vehemence that only a Democrat who sprang fully-armed from the forehead of the pro-impeachment movement and straight into Congressional majority can claim to be against tyranny must have some clear, unshaken, consistent demonstration of the purity of his own position that should be relatively easy to find in an afternoon.

If my technical ineptitude prevented me from finding any, I can only apologize to Chris Floyd for leaping to conclusions and calling into question the creds of such a well-known anti-war writer.

It's just that, being so dumb, I think about how nobody took this stuff seriously years ago, even people who are now considered stalwart progressives because they (eventually) "saw the light." And I feel, no doubt in my pre-internet mentality, that anyone who goes around saying, "screw everyone who isn't as progressive as I am, right now, at this very moment," is just screwing himself and his cause instead.

So I don't do it. And I don't like when other people do it, either. And if that kind of mentality is exemplary of a writer's point of view, maybe there's a reason I've never read him before.