NO OPPOSITION, PLEASE, WE'RE DEMOCRATS

First Mukasey skates, then Democratic leaders move to bottle up Dennis Kucinich's Cheney impeachment bill -- and then, in case the Dems didn't look weak and ineffectual enough, Republicans pulled a fast one on them and started voting for the bill, which led Democrats who'd voted for the bill (on the assumption that, thank God, it wouldn't pass and frighten anyone) to switch to a no vote in order to ensure it wouldn't pass.

Geldings. A party of geldings.

My favorite quote:

...House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, whose panel has jurisdiction over impeachment proceedings, has described the impeachment effort as a potential disruption.

"If the speaker were to let this thing out of the box, considering the number of legislative issues we have pending," the Michigan Democrat told Fox News, "it could create a split that could affect our productivity for the rest of the Congress."

Affect your what?

Your productivity?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*****

Now I remember why I resented it when the left blogosphere (or the kool-kid part of it, anyway) turned into the "netroots." I hadn't thought we were blogging with the direct intent of helping Democrats win elections. I thought the point was to create a counternarrative of American politics, which might actually spread the notion that Republican ideas aren't reasonable and Democratic ideas aren't cockeyed and treasonous, and might further spread the notion that the political world thinks Republican ideas are reasonable because Republican character-assassination politics has made Democrats and liberals seem like freaks. Oh, and maybe we'd eventually have Democrats within the system who didn't believe Democrats are freaks, people who believied it was worthwhile to go on fighting even while being called freaks.

But instead, in 2006 we just elected a larger-than-usual crop of the same kinds of Democrats we always elect when we elect Democrats. And they suck.

We still don't have much choice: For president we can elect the bald New York psychopath who'll make Bush and Cheney look reasonable -- or we can elect a Democrat who'll do none of what we want but won't do anything clinically insane while in office. Sorry: There is no left-wing alternative. This is America. We don't elect progressive third-party presidents.

You know what? At this point I'd vote for Schwarzenegger in a heartbeat, if he could run for president and the polls said he had a chance. No, not because he's progressive -- I'm not saying he is. I'm saying he's just barely progressive enough that he'd be able to get more progressive legislation passed as president than any Democrat will, even with a Democratic Congress, because a Democrat will be afraid to try to accomplish anything. Schwarzie might go for, say, environmental legislation that a Democrat would be too chickenshit to propose -- and if he were attacked, he'd just stay with it, not because he's such a tough guy, but because anybody looks tough compared to a Democrat. (And voters might accept it from him, or from Mike Bloomberg, because people who aren't Democrats don't walk around all the time wearing "Kick me!" signs they've made themselves.)

I don't know a way out. We have to keep voting for these weaklings, but only because they won't actively attempt to do the utterly insane things Republicans do. That's all we can hope to get out of it. It's barely enough, but it's enough. And we have to keep fighting for progressive ideas -- with the belief that eventually a wave of elected officials will have a little backbone and think trying to put them into practice is a good idea.