Hag — (Gotta give him credit for calling me by my first name, anyway…)

Moments ago, the Senate voted to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Well, thanks to crusading liberals like Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Robert Gates, and the overwhelming majority of all other Americans supporting such an overdue effort, they did.  And?

When that bill reaches my desk, I will sign it, and this discriminatory law will be repealed.

Whew.  Given your recurring capitulations to the right, I was afraid you might finally make a veto threat, about five too late, but thanks for taking pen in hand.

Gay and lesbian service members — brave Americans who enable our freedoms — will no longer have to hide who they are. The fight for civil rights, a struggle that continues, will no longer include this one.

Yeah, but thanks to you, everyone but the very rich are still well and truly fucked, as well as anybody who gives a rat’s ass about “our freedoms,” but I know you never liked me for my brains in the first place.

This victory belongs to you. Without your commitment, the promise I made as a candidate would have remained just that.

You mean, like all the other ones?

Instead, you helped prove again that no one should underestimate this movement. Every phone call to a senator on the fence, every letter to the editor in a local paper, and every message in a congressional inbox makes it clear to those who would stand in the way of justice: We will not quit.

We?  You’re including yourself in this group?  I hope the Secret Service is about to walk in with a great big silky garment bag, because otherwise, this shtick isn’t going over.

This victory also belongs to Senator Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and our many allies in Congress who refused to let politics get in the way of what was right.

Also?  For your information, like everything else you’ve “accomplished” over the last two years, those two were the ones who stood up for “politics” in the real sense, that is, representing the people who elected them.  You, on the other hand, have squandered your mandate, alienated your base, and made permanent the horrendous policies of your universally despised predecessor, because you’ve chosen “politics” over what was “right,” or even potentially effective, every time, and boy oh boy, did that turn out to be dumb.  (See Shellacking, The….)

Like you, they never gave up, and I want them to know how grateful we are for that commitment.

They haven’t given up yet, which says a lot more about them than you.  Both have been politically damaged, and Pelosi lost her speakership, due to your utter failure to use your bully pulpit and your self-destructive servility to their, and the American people’s,  political enemies.

Will you join me in thanking them by adding your name to Organizing for America’s letter?

No, I’d prefer to thank them personally.

I will make sure these messages are delivered — you can also add a comment about what the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” means to you.

Ah, you’re suddenly allowing comments?  It’s tempting, admittedly.

As Commander in Chief, I fought to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because it weakens our national security and military readiness. It violates the fundamental American principles of equality and fairness.

As Commander in Chief, you could have eradicated the policy in January 2009, if you felt so strongly about it.  You didn’t.

But this victory is also personal.

Really?  This better be good.

I will never know what it feels like to be discriminated against because of my sexual orientation.

But I know my story would not be possible without the sacrifice and struggle of those who came before me — many I will never meet, and can never thank.

Uh, a lot of the people you could thank happen to be (inconveniently) still alive, but you’re already in their spam files, so they’re missing this little missive.

I know this repeal is a crucial step for civil rights, and that it strengthens our military and national security. I know it is the right thing to do….

That may well be, but since you also think that it’s just dandy for our military and our “national security” that we should continue to expand our wars all over the globe and bomb, torture, and kill whomever we please, for whatever (usually secret) reason, I naturally take your opinions with a rather large grain of salt.

Thank you,

Barack

Barack?  Thanks, but I’d prefer to call you Mr. President, if only you’d help me out and act like one.  Otherwise, get thee to the furrier.

Interestingly, the “pragmatic” acceptance of right-wing policies as one’s own is accompanied by an adoption of the right-wing sales tactics that went with them, since, well, what else is there?  Liberals, nominal or otherwise, have never had to practice pitching such horrors; generally, in the old days, we lamented them.  But as far as setting up straw men, misdirecting anger, and victim-blaming, we really ought to return to our core competencies and leave that field to the right, if the astonishingly unconvincing crap I’m reading is any indication.  No, Kossack, Firedoglake’s candid and accurate assessment of the “enthusiasm gap” isn’t “stupid,” but rather a wake-up call to a compromised and languishing party whose craven leaders somehow thought couldn’t lose, even if it fucked up royally, which it did.  And no, No More Mister, Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher aren’t “Firebaggers,” when they criticize Bush-grade Democratic sellouts to corporations; they’re literate.  It makes a difference.

Now, the Obamabots are marveling at the mojo our Leader showed when he belatedly and inadequately fired up and, although with undue politeness, actually called out Republicans for the reprehensible behavior they’ve been exhibiting since before he was sworn in, which back then might have been a good idea, but now, after his serial capitulations, seems to all concerned to be the empty political gesture it clearly is.  Bush may have relied on media appearances rather than reality on many occasions to bolster his image, but he did deliver, for his particular slice of the electorate, on the bread and circuses part, too, that is if tax cuts are your bread and war is your circus…   Obama, for all his vaunted smarts, still doesn’t get this, and is going to pay dearly at the polls for it, deservedly.

Sadly, there is no group more likely to reinforce the meme that the reason for the Democrats’ utter failure to make use of their two-election mandate was Obama’s undetectable, but nevertheless disqualifying, “leftism,” than the Obamabots.  Each time they join Mitch McConnell and Dick Armey in decrying the “moonbats” within their own ranks, another Fox host gets her highlights, or maybe boob job.  Inevitable Democratic losses in November can be interpreted by the media in several ways: 1) They were due to a bad economy and Republican intransigence, which is only partly true but at least less damaging to the liberal cause over time; or 2) They were due to Obama’s capitulation to the right that caused his policies to fail and made him look like a vacillating, principle-free wimp; or 3) America is a center-right nation and only Republican-approved policies are ever acceptable, no matter how crazy and no matter how Americans vote.  This bunch, which calls itself liberal, seems to be gunning for #3, and they’re calling me stupid.  Sheesh.

Like many of the other publicly disaffected Democrats subject to serial, rote abuse from the left (ish) thought police, I would never dream of not voting in November, nor, I imagine, would any of the rest of us hippies White House spokesman Robert Gibbs thinks are in need of a drug test: no election is without consequences, and we’ll drag our pot and patchouli-scented selves to the voting booth regardless.  My question is…  Who else do you expect to do so?

Of course, the predetermined Beck/Teabagger memes will have to be used; Socialism, Death Panels, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Government Takeovers, blah, blah, blah.   It would be inconvenient, you’d think then, that the Republican “Road Map,” as it were, presented by the naively direct Wisconsin wingnut Paul Ryan, has a whole lot of socialism in it (for rich people, natch), envisions steadily increasing Medicare cuts which will undoubtedly cause premature deaths, incorporates the worst aspects of both Hitler’s and Wilson’s “Internationalism,” and takes the most popular and enduring “Government Takeover” in US history, Social Security, and hands it over to Wall Street.  You’d be wrong.  For Republicans and their fawning cheerleaders in the media, down is up if Jim DeMint says so and FOX News unsurprisingly agrees.

The tinny Victrola of terrorism is of course going to be cranked up anew, to play scratchy recordings of 2002-2003 and somehow claim that we’re not clobbering the Constitution fast enough, not torturing people with sufficient eagerness, and not invading enough countries to Keep America Safe.  This angle may be dropped later because in early rollouts it only fooled Richard Cohen, a feat akin to convincing Tom Friedman that Lexuses are preferable to olive trees.  You heard it here at CHNN first, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the terror well will finally be recognized (by the voters, not the media…) as having run inconveniently dry in a country with 10% unemployment and an economy still collapsing.  Please make a note of it, Rudy.

Of course, the real power behind the GOP, money, has already set the stage, and as such one can expect a lot more unnatural couplings between square pegs and round holes to ensue.  The way to “create jobs” is to abandon environmental regulation, any vestigial remains of progressive taxation, and give more tax-free money to worthless heirs and heiresses.  Neither remarkably nor evidently as a joke, the strikingly unattractive and almost as untalented version of Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes, has a new book out, not entitled “I Got Mine, Fuck You,” but might as well have been, to emphasize these not very new ideas.  Frank Luntz has almost just absentmindedly trotted out the same old anti-government crap that was so successful in perpetuating our third-world health statistics for another decade or three, to stop desperately needed banking reform,  but will people really fall for the notion that Wall Street banks that every day continue to rob Americans blind ought not be regulated?  That’s some pretty heavy lifting, even for the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

As they always do when they’re in a pickle, the GOP is making a lot of noise about teh ghey, this time about the long-overdue abandonment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy so ridiculous on its face that I have trouble believing it’s been the law of the land for almost eighteen years, and touting the purported “uprising” against marriage equality, financed by a bunch of wealthy churches whose primary concern is avoiding reality, even when it drops on their curiously adorned heads.  But time has shown that since the cynical 2004 “victories” that resulted from gay-bashing have only driven more younger voters away from the GOP, and even if John McCain doesn’t listen to Cindy and Megan, America does, and has.

They think, of course, that they have a new big thing in the Teabaggers, which is the first sign of actual non-astroturf political activity on the right since Tomothy McVeigh, and they understandably don’t want to waste a development like that .  Sarah Palin surely didn’t…  she got half a wardrobe’s worth of Teabagger dough for mouthing vaguely intelligible Randian Haiku in Nashville, just tonight, so I’ll bet she’ll be wearing something extra pretty for the occasion.  Still, given that even some of the craziest Republicans, Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, finally slinked away from the teabaggers, realizing they were already so bought and paid for by Wall Street and the real corporate Death Panelists in the Health “industry” that they might not have much in common with the teabaggers after all. Rotten vegetables are notoriously unflattering to the complexion.   Naturally, they both disingenuously blamed the annoying “big government” intrusion of pesky “ethics” laws for their fortuitous absences from a crowd that in the end, evidently didn’t “share their values.”

No wonder Sarah Palin quit her part-time day job; this evolution-denier can gaily fleece her (socially) Darwinistic inferiors for all they’re worth and not be unduly shackled by silly old “big government” ethics.  The Republican Party, not so much.  The policies they have chosen and continue to fight for are the exact ones that caused and will only merrily perpetuate the very pain the Teabaggers are feeling, and their overconfident claim to Teabagger loyalty is already wearing alarmingly thin, given that their craven, almost Cheneyesque money-grubbing went on lurid display at about week three of their “revolution’s” existence.

I have previously criticized the Democrats for running against Bush, after  all this time and so many of their own failures, but the only thing stupider than that would be the Republicans running as “Bush, Only More So.”  I can’t decide which one I want to lose more.  Let the (h/t Jon Stewart) “thinnest kid at fat camp” win.