Senator Feingold's recent DKos diary has made clear that the cupboard is bare for those of us expecting democracy to survive in the United States. We can write hopeful diaries that attempt to decipher to the rest of the DKos community the artful ways of Speaker Pelosi, but the Speaker, like the rest of her political clan, has no art or magic left. Whatever magic we thought we drew upon last November to break the Rovian spell on the electoral process has dissipated. Even a senator as respected by the DKos community as is Sen. Feingold has shown himself powerless to draw on the magic of the populace and the polls indicating the American people's desire to bring this unjust war to an end. To the good senator (whom I applaud for posting here) and his colleagues, we can attribute several reason for their general failure, among them a fealty to a political party rather than an ideal and those of us who still honor the later. But such reasons will prove to be but symptoms of a more general loss: Our ideal has lost its magic.
We can continue to call on these men and women to stand for democracy, to stand against the anti-democratic fog that once again comes on little cat feet (and sometimes on the feet of elephants and donkeys too), but these calls will not be answered. Only excuses will be tendered in hope of salvaging a vote or at least quieting the rabble. It is clear that when quibbles erupt within the ruling class, that it is, as in the days of monarchs, a family affair.
You and I can no longer expect these patricians to represent our plight (or the ideals of the U.S. Constitution) anymore than a French fishmonger could have expected the residents of Versailles to identify with her family's point of view.
In summary, each one stands up him or herself or not at all. I regret to admit that I have no delusions about what the final tally will be.