the dark age cometh

There's a reason why those Republican fundraisers fear Ted Kennedy.

For decades, the senior senator from Massachusetts has been the boogie man in the closet for every Republican flavor-of-the-month with his hand out. And every presidential campaign has featured some variation on the theme -- "He's even more liberal than Teddy Kennedy!!!"

Monday, the senator gave us a brilliant reminder of just why he's been so durably effective. His speech in support of an attempted fillibuster against Samuel Alito's nomination for the Supreme Court was a thing of rhetorical beauty. He put forth his concerns regarding this unsatisfactory nominee clearly and forcefully. It was a thing of beauty.

And it went for naught.

The fact that a Democrat could find reason to support this nomination is disgusting. In the case of Robert Byrd of West Virginia, I can only believe that it has something to do with advancing senility -- it's one thing to fight Republicans as they threaten the rules of the Senate, but you can roll over like a lapdog when they threaten Civil Rights or the Constitutional guaranteed checks and balances"

A day after Senate Democrats could barely muster two dozen votes to support a fillibuster, Sam Alito was sworn in on the high court and the Right Wing rejoiced. Roe v. Wade immediately went on life support. So did any governmental agency exercising any oversight of the corporate world. The bedrock of our liberty, the concept of "One person, one vote" was pulled from the wall of freedom, replaced by the "gospel (Alito's term)" of the unitary executive.

This day is a victory for corporate rights -- which in Alito's view always trumps the rights of what one Senator called "the mythical little guy."

It's a good thing Coretta Scott King didn't live to see it. She passed away quietly this morning. Today begins an all-out assault on everything her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, fought and died for.

We can only hope that this day will become a springboard for uniting those mythical little guys into a political force once more.

Republicans as they exercise power now have never had an effective political philisophy, but they have had a maginficent marketing campaign. The slogans come out at election time, but beyond that the Neo-Con agenda takes precedent over all else, including the Constitution.

In that vein, these Republicans have done some very bad deeds. They lied us into a war. They trashed the economy by shoveling money from our treasury to their big money contributors. They gutted government services -- especially emergency services -- by putting political cronies in charge.

Maybe now, instead of merely accepting the slogans and political rhetoric on "faith," people will begin to see that the words and the deeds have never matched up.

We can only hope.

More soon.