We lost this one. Not really a surprise, but certainly a grave disappointment. Whether because of poor tactics, the impossibility of being a minority, lack of conviction, fear, or traitor Dems, Samuel Alito will be on the Supreme Court.
We lost, and we got knocked down.
It's time to get up off the mat.
This was a big battle, one that will alter the Country in significant ways for 20 or 30 years. And we didn't get the job done. And that's to our discredit (I'm using "we" more to mean the party, than Dkos, which clearly worked its ass off). And that sucks. But we can't stay down.
We're still fighting a government bent on subverting our freedoms, one that takes away liberties in the name of defending them, one that places extremists on the Courts, incompetents into agencies that shouldn't be sullied by politics, and one that has the interests of the wealthy far ahead of the interests of the few.
This battle was lost, and that makes it even more important to win the rest of them. The midterms are approaching. If this nomination process has made on thing crystal clear, it's the need for more Democratic Senators. It's simply impossible to hold 45 Senators in line and get anything significant done, and this republican Party isn't offering up too many votes to peel away from their side. We need to retake a chamber. It doesn't matter which one, although the House seems more probable. At the very least, we need to cut into the majorities in both houses, so that 7 defectors still equals filibuster, and two or three wavering Republicans equals the death of whatever Republicans felt like destroying that day.
We've got to work twice as hard for 2006 now. Ceasing donations to the DNC, the DCCC or the DSCC, that's not the answer. Ceasing donations to individual politicians who have displeased us may be, but abandoning the party in general won't do any good. More time. More volunteering. More money. To prevent what happened today from happening again. Because Samuel Alito would not have happened under a Democratic majority, and the Party we want isn't going to be created by turning our backs on it.
We're stuck in a two party system, and the vested interests those two parties have in that system means that fact won't change any time soon. Republican or Democrat. Those are your options on a national level, as sorry a choice as that may seem to many. We've thrown our lot in with this side, because they're better, and because we know it, in spite of what has happened today. There's a long way to go in turning this party into what it needs to be. The conservative takeover of the Republican Party took 20 years. I don't know where the transformation of today's Democratic Party ends. But I know where it begins. November 7th, 2006.
It's time to make it happen. It's time to get up off the mat.