Dump Pelosi, Murtha for Speaker

What ran through my mind as I watched Republicans-Rummy coming apart at the seams was: what took so long? Sure, I feel great like everyone else but this doesn't answer for the thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives that are only the most visible damage of the rapidly closing Bush years. Americans finally came around. But wow, that stretch of bloodlust was a frightening spectacle. By now, at the very least, ten times the number of innocent people that died on 9/11 have died from us trying to set it right. Yes, now I am afraid of these people. I've seen what they can do.

They can take a ghost of a threat (a friend of mine says "they DID find some powder" to justify invading Iraq, and I like this person!) and watch bombs being dropped on civilian neighborhoods for Shock and Awe, and think well at least when we kill innocent babies it's an accident, but they do it on purpose in terror attacks, as if the dead would say, no problem, I know it was an accident.

Howard Zinn says a better word than "accidental" is "inevitable." If you know that civilian casualties happen 100 percent of the time when you bomb residential neighborhoods, then it's the same as doing it on purpose. You become the terrorist.

Did Americans come around soon enough to undo the damage of the Bush years? The country is bankrupt, global warming is closing in, the Constitution is in shreds since the Military Commissions Act, and there is still plenty of time for the Democrats to start the Bipartisanship Shuffle, which comes out anytime they don't have the stomach for the fight they are getting paid good money to fight.

First step: dump Pelosi. Jack Murtha for Speaker. She should be disqualified on grounds that, when she ruled out impeachment on 60 Minutes, she had no right to speak for the entire institution. Did you hear me, congressman-in-my-district? I don't give a damn what Nancy Pelosi said. You just worry about doing your own job.

Which brings me to the second step. What happened under the radar in this campaign was that a whole farm team of Democratic candidates was created, most notably with the veteran candidates of Fighting-dems.org. These are candidates who took their opposition to the Iraq War as their point of departure and then began softening up the Republicans, attacking them on Iraq from their vantage point of unassailable patriotism, and blasting the perception that being anti-Iraq War was the same as being anti-American.

It was a hastily assembled charge by political newbies but it worked, changing the political landscape so that Tuesday's victory by the Democratic party was possible. They were cut down almost to a man except for Sestak, Murphy, Carney, Waltz, and Webb who all made it to the top. Mission accomplished.

With Ned Lamont proving that a powerful incumbent like Lieberman can be knocked off in his own primary, the Pelosi faction should be careful about cutting and running behind "bipartisanship." Partition Iraq, bolster Afghanistan, secure the ports and do the rest of the 9/11 commission recommendations. Do the First Hundred Minutes Agenda or whatever they are calling it. Then start the subpoenas flowing, get ready to start asking rude questions about Halliburton, the NSA, Jose Padilla, plans for secret detention centers for American citizens, bundles of hundred-dollar bills being tossed around like footballs in Iraq, Pat Tillman, no-bid contracts for Katrina, and whether George Bush REALLY did not know that there were different kinds of Muslims, like Sunni and Shiite.

The farm team, the new wave of citizen-candidates like Lamont and the Fighting Democrats, will be waiting if the new Democratic leadership does not deliver. We took the Hill but a lot of good men went down. The casualty rate was appalling. But the job got done, and in politics, you get to get up and play all over again.