Vampires Howling at the Moon

The surest evidence that darkness appears before light of dawn is Pat Buchanan, Mort Zuckerman and Lawrence Kudlow on the same talking heads panel. A regular pack of vampires howling at the moon with supply-side, revisionist fangs. Only Harold Pinter could pen a better allegory defining the nature of tension and bullying small talk.

The spoils of war, my laddies, which recalls an old English tale about Oliver Cromwell. After he had sacked the town of Drogheda its citizens were rounded up and brought to the main square. Cromwell declared to his most loyal Lieutenants: "Brilliant! Kill all these women and rape all the men." An aide said: "Excuse me, Sir. Wouldn't that be the other way around?" A shrill voice from the gang called out: "Mr. Cromwell knows what he's doing!"

Stark treachery is also a time honored American tradition. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson told the Greek Ambassador to the US: " So fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant they may just get whacked by the elephants trunk, whacked good."

LBJ always meant what he said. Shortly afterwards the local junta, supported by the United States, took over and the Greek people spent seven years in hell.

As for the American elephant, it has grown to be a monstrosity of outlandish and horrific proportions.

Democrats will look upon this new day like the Greeks and the English citizens in the square. But all is not lost, not by a long shot. The weeks and months of right wing hypocrisy may be suffocating. Even loathsome. Our loss is in reality a simple tale of invasion of sovereign progressive territory, conservative occupation and --yes, you can say it-- control of oil. There will be time to sort through the rubble, evaluate better strategies and plan a more successful road to tomorrow, but we must be honest and demand of ourselves: "We will never allow ourselves to be defined again!"

Will the New Age Democrat shift further to the left or will he become a progressive party blending the best of traditional conservationist values along with the time-honored tradition of economic populism? Or will the bread-and-butter social engineering programs win our hearts and minds during the next primary season?

Those are the questions that must be answered. Because the fork in the road ahead is a New Democratic Party with a larger tent that can reach to the secular angels of our nature, or a rising third party that splits the party in two and leaves the fractured ideology to the likes of Cromwell and LBJ. Yes, my fellow Democrats - we have some soul-searching to do - and we will rise better for having performed the execise.

The GOP's contemptible subservience to this criminal regime demeans and dishonors our country and defames the values to which it professes God-fearing loyalty. Take a good look at the faces of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, a pair of blood thirsty wild animals, and soon you will realize that the stakes are bigger than just the United States. All this in pursuit of the "moral crusade", to bring "peace and stability to the world".

In the mean time we have a clear obligation, which is to resist.