What in the world has happened to us?
Democratic idealism that once alone gave the nation its needed social safety net, civil rights legislation, and environmental protection is becoming ossified and in danger of ensuring a permanent party of strident second-guessing and deductive furor at the loss of almost all political power. A majority of the state legislatures and governorships is lost. The Senate is lost. The House is lost. The Presidency is lost, the Supreme Court almost. Whether Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, minorities no longer have any need of liberal gate-keepers or of a particular patron like Barbara Boxer.
The former idealists and reformers have become backward-looking. Like most reactionaries whose comfortable world is vanishing, they are frustrated, looking for scapegoats and acting very, very bizarrely. Thus for a sober documentarian Edward R. Murrow, we now get the conspiracist Michael Moore who praised the terrorists who kill voters in Iraq as Minutemen. Instead of JFK's muscular idealism, we see a Ted Kennedy hours before the historic elections in Iraq screaming to withdraw American troops. And in place of a crusading Hubert Humphrey, we now endure Barbara Boxer endlessly on television not to apologize, but to recycle the boorishness of her earlier distortions against Condoleezza Rice.
This is all so sad.
Well, we elected 
the harpy.
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