There are things that need to be said

If these political pushers can throw a man like John Murtha under the bus, they can do it to anyone.

This is what it's come to, a decorated Marine pilloried for political points by a nitwit freshman congresswoman, a draft-dodger VP and a TANG playboy. Not to mention the bread-and-circuses resolution the GOP floated to discredit Murtha's proposal. Will the last to leave this madhouse please turn out the lights? The inmates are willfully living in the dark already.

Everyone who voted Republican, I hope you're happy. Everyone who let the long lines, lack of voting machines, poll watchers/inimidators, crappy weather, work schedule, whatever keep you from voting, I hope you're happy too. Everyone who couldn't be bothered to vote, or couldn't be bothered to learn enough about the current situation to feel comfortable pulling a lever, touching a screen or anything else, I hope you're happy. Everyone who voted in one of the enabling assholes--of whom Murtha was until recently a member--I hope you're happy.

I sure the fuck hope you're happy, because if you aren't, you helped fuck this up and it'll likely end up that not even the Bush administration and its useful idiots in Congress are going to end up with much to show for it. Hopefully they'll be brought lower than the Nixon gang, low beyond the hope of recall in the shadowy netherworld of talk radio and the "balanced" op-ed pages of dying newspapers. But even if all they face are three years of emasculation and impotence (which, while hard to bear for tough-talking bullies like these, isn't nearly punishment enough; anyone up for a trip to The Hauge?), even if the military and its friends like Murtha convince them to leave Iraq before many more lives are lost, the damage this had done, this five years of incompetance and, frankly, an unwillingness to aim for competence, will be horrendous.

We'll have a symbol--perhaps in the sad husk that was America's most interesting city, New Orleans. We'll have to overcome a mind-boggling deficit held entirely too much by a strategic rival. We'll have to live with generations of poorly educated people unable to adapt to new economies. We'll have the domestic economic, racial and other divides to overcome that have been exacerbated by this pack of morons. We'll get the chance to really understand Britain's post-WWII malaise and the fall of the Roman Empire. Like as not, we won't recover in our lifetimes, nor our childrens', not as a recognizable United States, and hopefully not as what we've become. It's a sorry state to reach where you'd rather see your country cease being than continue in its current path.

I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I really think it's hard to understate the danger the ideal of America is in, really hard to overstate the dire consequences of a descent into autocracy, torture, dictatorship, madness.

Oh, and for those who think "It can't happen here," you're helping it happen. Stop now.