I voted to support Pelosi in the poll, and I'm happy with it.

I'd have been happier with a quicker end to the idiocy, but I think some of the purists should do some thinking here. How many reps would have supported a "Peace Now" alternative? Maybe 30 or 40. As it is, look at the initial reaction to Murtha. Most of the caucus couldn't get away from him fast enough. But it started a process, so just about everybody but Lieberman concedes most of the points that Murtha was making.

What changes the process? Time, news of fresh disasters, and public pressure. When YOU have the majority in Congress, peaceniks, then you can pass whatever measure you want. Until then, you're going to have to get the bluedogs in on it, or we lose. And you're going to have to get the Maxine Waters in there too. Once you've got the votes, you win. Not on good intentions. See how it works? You can dress up in pink and shout slogans all you want, it doesn't get a single vote to the cause.

Want a good example of a zealot screwing things up? The Code Pink transgendered person who got into the shot continually during the Plame hearings, thereby giving reporters a total distraction. Did it bring in votes? No, it was a self-indulgent freak show and it played that way on TV.

I just draw your attention, peeps, to the 1972 election. Most of the American people wanted an end to Vietnam. That's really true. And most of them also wanted an end to dirty hippies and the like. That's unfortunately true, too. In fact, there's a lot of polling data to indicate that the antiwar movement and all the allied causes got people into the Nixon camp. He won a huge landslide, peaceniks. He won, and the last combat troops left Vietnam the next month. The public was antiwar? He gave 'em antiwar. They wanted to stomp on the hippies? He stomped on them. Whether you and I like it or not, Nixon started the great big move to the right, and he could do it because of violence in the streets and communes and pot-smoking.

So, go ahead. Explain over and over again why this isn't good enough. Get up and make speeches, like Murtha. Hit your points over and over. Eventually, if you're right, people like MoveOn will support you, and Nancy Pelosi will answer your phone calls.

Pelosi worked very hard to get what she wanted, or at least what was possible. Do you think the Democratic Party is, or ever will be, a revolutionary vanguard? Don't be ridiculous. It's the oldest political party on earth, operating in an institutional framework erected by the constitution. So they're not going to march on the White House with machine guns. Nor should they.

FDR was a wealthy man who ran as a Democrat. He headed off a growing leftist rebellion within the U.S. and moved the Democratic party to the left. He had to make a deal with the Democratic South, though it went against his impulses and certainly against his wife's impulses. The showdown on segregation came a lot later, and, as Johnson predicted, it put the Democratic Party in limbo for at least a generation. This is American politics the way it's supposed to be played -- that's the way the Federalist Papers saw things playing out. Equal branches. There wasn't even supposed to be parties, but that was impossible.

Is there room for the revolutionary impulse? Sure. Pure consensus politics without input from the streets, or from thinkers in the press, or academe, or bohemia, ends up being too much about compromise.

What is very annoying is this: the left wants to control a party they didn't build, don't influence any large number of votes in, and wants to be a pain in the ass for the next two years. Why? Why don't you just keep organizing larger and larger demonstrations? That might do something. There are now a number of center-left institutions building. Want to contribute to something further left? Go ahead. Then when the next historic shift to the left comes, and it's coming, you'll have influence.

Our common enemy is the sort of misrule that started, really, in 1968, the last time the left got out ahead of the people, and lost the center to the Reagans and Bushes. Attack them, fer chrissakes.

You have seen the real war party: it's the Bush party, which took the unprecedented step of committing us to an aggressive war by telling lies about it. (Oh, okay, James K. Polk, too.) With the heartbreaking exception of Vietnam, The Democrats have a pretty good record. If you don't make any difference between World War II and the CIA's dirty wars in Africa, or between Iraq and Bosnia, then I don't know what to think of you. No wars? Never? So we should have turned our cheek to Japan and ignored Hitler? Should we also live Vegan? Have sex in a commune because possessiveness, man, is like, such a drag?

Go ahead. Try to convince a sizable number of Americans that pacifism is a viable option. You've lost me from the start.