Thanks Glenn. You've nailed it once again. I grew up in West Virginia and was proud to cast my first vote for Sen. Rockefeller, whom I saw as a strong progressive who, if he were from any other state, would likely be president some day. What a disappointment he has proved to be. He had accomplished basically nothing in the Senate until CheneyBush came to power and since has distinguished himself as their biggest enabler. You neglected to mention he also supports granting telecoms immunity for spying on Americans. I suppose since West Virginia has swung far to the right in recent years, he is merely pandering in order to stay in power, but you would think someone with his personal fortune would be above such craven pandering. This is why it's imperative that Barack Obama, John Edwards or, less likely, Dennis Kucinich be the Democratic nominee for president. HRC is just like Rockefeller and the other establishment Dems. It's time they for them to pack their bags and head home for the good of the nation. Thanks again.

In the light there is darkness.

In the darkness there is light.

In each of there is guilt and innocence.

Perhaps, even in me, there is some GOP.

Worry about ideological purity afterwards.

GG,

The question is: How do we deal with it as democrats?

And frankly speaking there does not seem to be an answer.

Not to vote for the democrats is one answer.

It does punish those wimpy democrats, and there are many of them who deserve to be punished.

But it also leads to republican victories.

At the end of the day no matter how one looks at it, we are screwed, period.

Again, how do we deal with this?

If we stay away from voting for democrats, we lose and the republicans win.

What is the solution?

A little over one year after the American people took the Congress out of the hands of the Republicans, we find out the party given the responsibility to check the authoritarian rule of the Former Cheerleader and his Gang of War Criminals, is in fact: The Vichy Democrats.

Time to drain the fetid Congressional swamp and rid ourselves of these quislings.

Here's a fantasy scenario that I wouldn't bet on but doesn't seem impossible. Al Gore and Howard Dean should simply declare war on the Democratic Establishment: the Pelosis and Reids and Schumers and Clintons and Obamas who have utterly failed us. He should announce the formation of a Progressive Union that will meet in conjunction with Yearly KOS.

There we would issue a new Port Huron Statement or some kind of Democratic version of the Contract With America agreed upon by all the netroots and other progressives and as many congressional officeholders as we can muster. The essential message of that statement: Enough is enough. We've had it.

That statement would air our specific grievances with the current leadership and threaten to go on strike and cripple the party if our demands are not met. The statement could be in the form of a petition seeking signers who will commit to work together collectively to force the Leadership to do their duty.

Ultimately, we might be able to start a protest movement within the party that gets tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of signatures of the people whose time, money, and votes the Leadership need to stay in the majority. If we had hundreds of thousands of what used to be solid Democratic supporters threatening to go on a general strike, the leadership would have to listen, if for no other reason than to keep their fancy jobs and titles. The triangulators and DLCers will have decide which side they're on.

I am not talking about a counterproductive Ralph Nader effort here. Nader's decision to sink Al Gore was idiotic in the extreme. If Gore had been president and the last 7 years had never happened, I would be perfectly content to stay in my job helping get Democrats elected. In 2000, a Nader movement meant getting Bush instead of Gore -- a difference of monumental proportions.

But at this point in 2007, we have far less to lose. We have seen that a Democratic Congress under the current Leadership makes very little difference. Electing a triangulator like Hillary or Obama as president would obviously be better than a Giuliani or a Romney but will accomplish little, at best simply postponing futher disaster until the next Republican Caesar comes along and exploits all the precedents the current Democratic Leadership have allowed them to create.

Now that's a movement that I would be willing to lose my cushy job for.

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jkalos said, "But it seems to me that these abuses are so egregious that if I were one of these minority democrats watching this happen--wars with people dying, torture, suspension of habeas corpus, and so on--it would seem to me that it constitutes an emergency. And if soldiers are willing to die for their country then maybe this good minority might do more than simply vote against the policies? Why not have demonstrations in congress to stand up for conscience?"

I work for a firm that does consulting work for many of the big Democrats in Congress and I wonder the same thing you do.

I've been in a state of shock since 2000 and a state of despair since 2004. I wrote off the stolen election of 2000 as being an extaordinary and singular (I thought at the time) occurrence. After 2002 I was pissed off at the spineless advice my boss and others gave the Democrats and began to think about speaking out. I argued internally that we needed to be much more aggressive but in the kind of firm I work in, the bosses have very strong opinions and the opinions of their employees carry no weight whatsoever.

By 2003, with the obvious WMD hoax and illegal war of aggression, it became clear that things were far worse than I had ever thought possible. I applauded the rise of Howard Dean and the desperately needed kick in the pants he gave to the Democratic Establishment. Dean singlehandedly established that the Democrats could go on the offense on tax cuts and Iraq, and, during the primaries at least, the rest of the Democrats fell into line behind Dean.

My firm, like a lot of Democratic firms, ended up doing work for John Kerry. I had high hopes for Kerry, but he let us all down. Again the bosses inside the consulting firms counseled abject weakness. Again I raised objections internally pointing out all of the golden opportunities to go on offense that were being left on the table. Again I was ignored. The bottom line is the Democratic Establishment blew that election. That's all there is to it. They were weak and they blew a historically critical presidential election. That much is crystal clear.

Since then I have become almost completely cynical. I considered writing a book, which I probably should have done, but I was physically and emotionally exhausted, and instead I have just drifted along. I have become more and more cynical and jaded seemingly every month since then, as this lie is exposed or that outrage is perpetrated and no one is held accountable. I had a glimmer of hope in 2006 when we took back the Congress, something I had been working for practically since I began working in politics.

But the Democratic Congress continues to let us down time after time. I was a little hopeful that Waxman's or Conyer's investigations were going to take off, but they seem to have faded into the background. The rest of them have had numerous opportunities to take a stand but most of them are gutless. The presidential frontrunners, Hillary and Obama are disappointing at best.

I have lost almost all faith in the Democratic party I have worked my ass off for and supported all my life.

But I'm as lost as anyone else when it comes to solutions. At this point, so many of the leaders of the Democratic party are so compromised and complicit on matters of such extreme gravity that I don't believe piecemeal reform of the party will work. There needs to be a revolution within the party like that of the movement conservatives who took over the Republican party in the 70's. The problem is that the movement conservatives were very well funded, while we progressives are not.

I think the rise of blogs has been very important, but in and of itself is insufficient. We need a movement to take back our party from the losers who control it now. That will surely include as many primary challenges as we can muster, but I think it will take something more to dislodge the Establishment.

What we really need is leadership. No one who has a real chance in the presidential election has really done this. Other than Kucinich and maybe Dodd, no one has even attempted to play the role that Howard Dean played in 2003-4. Kucinich unfotunately is not a viable candidate and Dodd's problem is that we didn't heard from him on any of these issues until lately.

Hillary and Obama are pathetic. They are triangulating, while Rome burns.

There are a lot of Democratic officeholders who are good people and feel the same way we do on these issues. Like jkalos says, they need to step up to the plate and do something that is not just business as usual. There are a lot of us out here who would follow them and back them up and give them money. The progressives in Congress could cripple the Leadership if they decided they have had enough, but it would require a radical change in their political consciousness.

For that matter, we progressives outside the Congress could cripple them if we could find a way to work together. Maybe we need to form a Progressive Union within the party and threaten to go on strike, withholding our votes, our money, and our time. But I don't see anything like that happening without leadership from some of our existing officeholders.

Where have you gone Howard Dean and Al Gore?