Dear Democratic Party Office Holders:

November's election should be a Democratic rout. Our nation is suffering through endless, costly and criminal BushCo wars, through one crushing Republican financial cataclysm piled upon the next, and through the wholesale evisceration of our once sacrosanct Constitutional rights, freedoms and liberties. Plainly, the Republican Party has devolved into a kleptocratic cancer cluster, and most everyone knows it.

So with Methuselah McSame and his brain-challenged pit bull still yapping at his heels—why doesn't Barack Obama blast these Repugs right out of their slimy, lying Swiftboats? Where is the rage, indignity and push-back to tactics that even Karl Rove, the infamous fart blossom of Mordor, cites as going a wee bit too far? To be fair, both Obama and Biden seem to be coming off the mat, but the problem with you elected Dems goes far deeper than this year's presidential race.

One issue, of course, is money. Since corporate America got hip to playing both ends against the middle, and now funds you guys pretty much co-equal with their own pachyderm compadres, you Dems have turned into jellyfish. Frankly, you never really were the working-class party, but at least you made like you were trying. While you curry our favor and, once installed in office, throw us the occasional bone, we common folk are all too often force-fed corporate-writ legislative offal.

Republicans are waging and will continue to wage economic war against 90 percent of their fellow Americans. Republicans are and will remain the party of the rich and the microminded. So why do you elected Dems feel compelled to bend your spines to accommodate them? On the state level, for instance, why the Republican victory in the California budget war? Why cave to opponents when you are the majority, when your opponents offer no substantial compromises and, moreover, when they stand for precisely what's reprehensible to you and your voting base?

Unfortunately, your proclivity for wimping out is nothing new. Had Congressional Democrats the intestinal fortitude to fully investigate, and FDR's attorney general the gravitas to prosecute, the fascist simps involved in the 1933 White House putsch, houses Morgan, du Pont and Remington—as well as Prescott Bush and the rest of those treasonous bastards—would have been removed from the political landscape, and our democracy today would look a lot more democratic.

Generations later, we're still struggling with the very same ultrarich robber barons—those antidemocratic aristocrats with their considerably time-enhanced political powers and money. So what happens? You Democrats hand them $700 billion of our dissipated lucre to pay for outrages they've inflicted upon the economy!

So listen up, Dems: According to voter registration, there are at least 11 million more of us than them. Articulate and hammer away at a truly new New Deal, and you're sure to garner still more. Learn, dammit, to stick to your liberal guns. Proudly broadcast a shopper's comparison of your progressive agenda with the alternative—that moldering stench of more greedy, conniving, violently Machiavellian years of Dark Age Republican "reform."

But you Democrats have a ways to go. Hell, you don't even honor your own identity. You've let the word "liberal" get smeared so badly few of you dare even utter the attribute in mixed company. You're the Democratic Party, and yet bullies taunt you, labeling you the "Democrat Party." Have you no self-respect? Fire back. Call 'em Repubs, Repugs or Republican'ts or, at the very least, for chrissake, stand up for your own name!

Decorum, while admirable, counts for nothing against a gilded cult of space-age, lizard-brain barbarians. Ever since 1994, when former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich put out the Repugs' "Contract on America," the emergent mutant brood has swung "nukular" clubs, their yowling mouths frothing with fact-defying grunts. In your heart of hearts, do you not believe that their jack-boot operatives would not spy on you, steal every last election, then torture your silly ass before crushing you like bugs, were it not for frayed remnants of our serially abused United States Constitution? Yes, that same Constitution you elected Democrats have so little interest in protecting. I'm fingering you, Ms. Speaker Pelosi, along with your cowardly, calculating Congressional-leading cohorts.

Three generations of the Bush family have been directly involved in high crimes and misdemeanors. Prescott in 1933's Business Plot, GHW with Iran Contra and now Dubya, who's broken too many laws to enumerate here.

Why did you Dems give each a pass and go? Talk about upholding our Constitution! So, as Drew Weston, author of The Political Brain, observed, "You can take almost any position you want on any issue, as long as it's not the fetal position."

 P. Joseph Potocki plans to re-embrace the Greens, should elected Democrats remain invertebrate. Open Mic is now a weekly feature in the Bohemian. We welcome your contribution. To have your topical essay of 700 words considered for publication, write [ mailto:[email protected] ][email protected].

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