Thanking The Readers

You deserve it. I have watched my counter numbers still rise without my having given any reason for you to look in here for far too long. Writing was simply impossible. I had taken on a job which demanded eight solid hours of constant intellectual work on a computer and allowed me to do absolutely nothing else. I don't know if you have ever done such a thing. I never did by choice, even when writing a doctoral dissertation. At my age and health it has pushed me absolutely to my mental limit. I did it well, but it hurt like a bastard, and it made writing here impossible.

I am still not fully recovered. It will probably take another week before I can get back up to my usual rate of one long post every two or three days. But I have not forgotten you, and, since I am at least convalescent after ending this horrible mental strain, I will at least be putting some more prose in here on a regular basis.

The disgust and despair of watching the creeping fascism of the Bush Administration and the Nazi saluting of its apologists still remains. My rhetoric to castigate both of them is simply exhausted. I am sustaining the political tone of this blog solely in hope that we can save this country in November of 2006, despite the probability that the clowns will start yet another war before then to try to cow us all into accepting the wholesale destruction of our privacy and the rule of law.

As I have intimated below, it is hope only. I personally think that one of the most devastating things about recent Democratic Congressional defeats is that it has left only the safest Democratic seats occupied. Over these last four years I have come to believe that many, if not most, of these seats have been occupied by Democrats who have risen to their level of incompetence.

What will it take to overcome their spinelessness? Guantanamos for American dissenters as well as foreign Muslims? Or not even this?

I had some hopes from Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha. But all the rest have slipped back into the oblivion of Beltway manuvering and spin. The true voices of courage--Al Gore, Howard Dean, and thousands of smaller Democrats in the base--have simply been marginalized by those Washington Democrats who fiddle while Rome burns.

But there is hope, even if it is hope of a rather offensively tasteless sort. The blatant "we can do business with her" courting of Hillary Clinton by Rupert Murdoch indicates that the saner elements of the money behind the Republican Party are beginning to want to hedge their bets. Do they know something we don't? Nah. With Presidential approval starting to crack the floor of 30%, the people who think the country is "headed in the wrong direction" flirting with 70%, and a growing number of sitting Republican officeholders and back door fixers being investigated or indicted, nobody in their right senses would discount the possibility of a Democratic landslide in November.

But the fact that it still remains a possibility only, rather than a goal relentlessly pursued by Hillary Clinton and their ilk, taking courageous advantage of the growing Republican political weakness, is a tribute to the impotent flaccidness of the Democratic Party brought about by Bill Clinton's Presidency and its neglect of the party base.

Here's hoping that a stunning defeat of Joe Lieberman by Ned Lamont in the Connecticut primary will be a wake-up call for Hillary and the Boys in Washington to stop "triangulating" and start fighting.

Here's hoping.

It's good to want to write again. And thanks for being patient with my exhaustion.