[dreadgeek]

Oregon is a vote-by-mail state so my wife and I filled out our ballots a few days ago. She dropped them off this morning.

The optimist in me hopes that enough liberals and progressives did the math and decided that a spineless Democratic congress that had a near-death experience is better than a rabid Tea Party/Republican congress but I doubt it. Here's the thing, what we might end up with is the next-worst of all worlds--a divided government that can't get anything done. The GOP will probably take the House but not the Senate. That means two years of effectively nothing getting done OR Obama having to tack so far to the right that he loses his base and then gets a primary challenge from his left. If that happens, it's over for him, I can't think of a single time in living memory that a President has had a primary challenge and gone on to win the general election.

Now, starting tomorrow you're going to start hearing some narratives. The first--and most pernicious of them--will be that the Democrats lost so many seats because they were too liberal. That's a load of bull. The Democratic losses are going to be due to them not being liberal *enough*. Imagine, if you will, if Gitmo went back to just being a Marine base in Cuba, if the warrantless wiretap program had gone away, if investigations into the malfeasance of the Bush administration were underway or had wrapped up, if Medicare-for-all were the law of the land and if a *real* WPA-style jobs program had been created. Does anyone believe that the GOP would even be competitive except in locales so safe that they could run Osama bin Laden and win?

Much of what one needs to know about the difference between the parties can be summed up here: Mr. Obama has done nothing violating the Constitution and one of the *first* orders of business for a GOP-controlled House will be to start impeachment proceedings against him. ALL the evidence points to Mr. Bush having lied to get us into a war and the Democrats wouldn't even consider pursuing an investigation. Why? In the name of 'bipartisanship' and because--and here I quote directly from both Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid; "if we did that then the Republicans will just do tit-for-tat". I want to shake both of them and ask "so, how'd that 'if we let things slide, they'll let things slide' work out for you?" It was stupid and craven. And yet, the Democratic party is all we have standing between us and full-blown theocratic fascism in this nation.

Make no mistake, the Tea Party has most of the elements of a full-blown fascist movement and the Republican party has *long* been moving toward theocracy.

I hope that everyone here will vote because the stakes are really, really high.