Solidarity.  Togetherness.  Organization.  These are the buzzwords of
the left, and I've been hearing them in just about every other
sentence lately.  Myriad pleas by party leaders, begging us to work
together, slipping in that ubiquitous "can't we all just get along" so
often my ears are about to bleed.  When you take a good, hard look at
Congress, there's more bending over backwards than at your average
Cirque de Soleil performance.  All this because the Democratic party
wants to be known as a kinder, gentler party, one of a thousand points
of light and… wait, wrong Bush administration.  The current Democratic
Party, despite their senate majority, still wants to be seen as the
"warm fuzzy bunny" of the political sphere, and that just isn't going
to cut it anymore.  The only fuzzy bunny I want to see associated with
party is that little white rabbit with a fondness for the jugular vein
from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Everyone is chock full of ideas to get the left back together again.
Maybe we shouldn't BE together.  But we are a majority rule nation,
and sometimes we have to take one for the team.  I know full well this
is going to piss a lot of Greens off.  Fine.  But until you have a candidate
who represents the views of more than 3% of the national voting public,
or you redirect your energies to where they will make the most amount of
change, I'm not going to take you seriously and neither is anybody else.

Let me say this much: Ralph Nader is a joke.  I'll repeat that, just
so that you can all hear me, especially you folks in the back row.
Ralph Nader is a JOKE.  Sure, he wasn't a joke to that vast 3%
of the nation who voted for him, but to the other 97%, he was and is a
JOKE.  Please, can we accept this fact and let him fade away by the
next election?  The Green Party has wonderful ideas, and yes, in the
past election, at the local and state level, I voted for Greens.  I
thought they were the ones who were most qualified to create change.
They also had a hell of a lot more on the ball than Ralph Nader did.

See, this is the part that the most obnoxious of the greens forget.
Third parties do not do well in presidential elections. They
keep trotting out Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose party of 1912,
but keep forgetting that #1, Teddy lost, and #2, the only reason he
came so close to winning is because he was a charismatic fellow who
was well liked by many Americans.  Ralph Nader is about as charismatic
as a used dog toy, and as well liked as a child molester in most
circles.  And at any rate trying to take over a presidential election,
being  perceived as the reason we've got an idiot in office, and then
whining because nobody likes you isn't helping his popularity any.

With that said, Democrats, we need to talk.  It's not good enough
that we have the knowledge that we were right, and we were robbed of
an election.  We need to let everyone else know this, without looking
like whiners ourselves.  The Democratic Party right now, is full of
touchy-feely people who want to spend more time apologizing for things
we haven't done than making sure that we never again have the
presidency stolen.  Enough of that crap is enough.  I realize I'm
preaching to the choir here, but the message needs to be sent loud and
clear to our "elected" officials that we are pissed, and we are
not going to put up with their shit any more.  Protests and
marches are good, but usually the only coverage protests get are
"look-at-the-freaks" snippets on the local news.  We need well thought
out media assaults, that won't scare the bejesus out of mom and pop at
home, but will get the point across, and encourage more people to get
angry and get involved.

Any government teacher will tell you that the true power in the
nation rests not in the elected officials, but in the people who
elected them.  This is true, despite what Scalia and his henchmen
think.  Write your state representatives.  They may want to be
Congressmen someday.  Make it clear that if they don't speak for you
from the get-go, they'll never get your vote when they want to go to
the major leagues.  Write your Congressmen (and women) and tell them
that if they don't get spine implants but quick, you will drop them
faster than you can say "Mambo Number Five" at the polls.

We have got to stop being the cute and cuddly party.  This does not
mean we turn into Republicans.  This means that if someone shafts us,
we're not going to roll over and whimper.   We're going to stand up,
say "you just picked the wrong person to screw over" and kick some ass
until things are the way they should be.  It means that if we want to
achieve greater unity in the party we're going to have to get tougher.
 We need to offer the hand of inclusion to all the third parties out
there and say "Ok, come on board, but if you pull shit like you did in
the last election, you're out of the club for good."

In return, we as a party need to understand that not only are we too
moderate, but we're well on our way to becoming "Republican lite".
We need to reclaim some of our radical heritage and make sure that we
don't lose it again.  We saw what happens when you get too sure of
yourselves, and we have an unelected president sitting in the White House
(when he bothers to show up) to show for it.  We need to change our image,
and we need to do it quickly, so that in the next election, we don't get fucked over.