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[stevebody]

I've been locking horns with s couple of truly twisted rightie lunatics on the WS forums and to come back here and read this one and, well, it gladdens my old heart to see such gentility and courtesy.

I used to work for the Democratic Party, usually as a publicist and public-speaking trainer and came out of he last race (Harvey Gant for NC Senate in '09) as disillusioned about both parties as I'll ever hope to be.

There truly is NO civility today. The old golden rule of Agreeing to Disagree is stone dead and the carcass carted away. The thinking now is that if you don't agree with me, you're a dangerous traitor and Something Muct Be Done About You. The California Recall is symptomatic of that. The guy, however bad a governor he may be, WAS elected by a majority of the people and should, therefore, serve out his time, much as a condemned man might. The principle? You Elected Him, Bubba, you suffer the consequences and try harder next time. Now, with Ahnuld's teat firmly enmeshed in the wringer, CA Democrats are ALREADY saying that, if Schwarzie is elected, they'll stump another petition drive to RECALL THE RECALL! Anybody see where this is leading?

I live in a state so freakin' strange that mots people here think "Twin Peaks" was a documentary but, somehow, we elect people here and they stay elected, we snipe and nip at one another but still talk across the aisle. I'm not promoting WA as a model - not as long as we have things like Tim Eyeman running amok - but stylish disagreement and Making Good Enemies used to mean something.

My all-time favorite political insult was the member of the Virginia Legislature, back in the late 1700s, who said of John Randolph, "Here is a man so thoroughly brilliant and so thoroughly corrupt that, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks." Man! Who wouldn't love to be insulted like that! Randolph, as the story goes, used the line the rest of his life and got a bang out of it every time.

American politics used to be a creative and fractious arena where you could bash your colleague's head in on the Senate floor and have cocktails with him that night. Now, we have idiots like the two fleabags I hooked up with on WS who actually wrote that several (or maybe all) members of the Democratic Party WANTED American soldiers to die in Iraq because it would advance their evil political agenda. Can you imagine?

I don't doubt that the Recall was engineered by frustrated Right-Wingers who just didn't like that a Frammin-Jammen Democrat won the state house. I also don't doubt that the flood of people coming forth with stories about Ahnuld's past indiscretions NOW, conveniently just before the election, were rounded up and put up to it by Democratic strategists.

Politics suck. SUCK. If there were ever a person in the White House like Jed Bartlett or Barbara Jordan, I'd lick stamps for them until my tongue bled. But it ain't gonna happen in my lifetime...