Kind of them, at last.

They admit they saw this coming (who did not?), and today not even the most slavish Democratic exhortation site can muster the usual pro-leadership slobber.

The Democratic push began in earnest on the last weekend of April 2001, when 42 of the 50 Democratic senators attended a retreat in Farmington, Pa., to hear from experts and discuss ways they could fight a Bush effort to remake the judiciary.

Emmett Till and his mother,
Mamie Bradley, 1955
[NAACP photo]

But why plan early (they claim they did) when later they willingly state the following:

Democratic aides said there had been even less strategy than usual in trying to coordinate the questioning by the eight Democratic senators. The situation was complicated because senators and staff were out of Washington before the hearing.

Selma to Montgomery march, 1965
[NY World Telegram and Sun collection]

As I read the Nagourney article in the NYT yesterday, the pale walls around me turned to blood, blood red. I was shocked at my anger.

"By Any Means Necessary"
Malcolm X, d. February 21, 1965

All I ask is this: please box the party up, give the carcass a burial. From CNN, Jonathan Turley on Saturday:

NGUYEN: Yes, going through the motions, but what are we truly learning?

Jonathan, let me ask you this very quickly.

Do you think he will be confirmed?

TURLEY: I think he will, and he will owe that to the Democrats. I think they have done a perfectly horrible job in advancing their interests here.

They lacked strategy, direction, discipline. There's little evidence of a Democratic Party.

And I think most of us are very surprised about it. If they can't muster their troops on this one, I don't understand when they could.

NGUYEN: Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, thanks so much for speaking with us this morning.

Edmund Pettus Bridge, Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965

Not much to say.

I, and many others, have spent years railing at the party for lack of strength, lack of cohesion, lack of purpose, lack of real and therefore visible belief in the great civic changes that they had been privileged to assist into being. Yes, those who fought and died needed a political partner, however fractured.

Edmund Pettus bridge March 7 1965
[Estate of Martin Luther King, jr]

Across decades, they have walked away, abandoned, left town, turned away, did not show up. Finally, as a party they just morphed, became the lesser versions of the modern Republicans.

Bush is outcome, but so is Reid.

"ABC News interrupted the network's Sunday night movie, the premiere showing on television of Judgment at Nuremburg (a movie about bringing to justice the Nazis guilty of war crimes in World War II), to show 15 minutes of raw and dramatic footage from the attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge."
[Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, p. 136]

What the Democrats walked away from (above all else, the list is long) is the vote. People died in this country for the vote, it is the truth... They were imprisoned for the right to organise to register others to vote. Women were beaten and tortured in prison for the vote. Blacks and whites died, side by side, for the right to vote.

Chaney Schwerner Goodman,
Philadelphia MS, August '64

If you abandon the right to vote, you have abandoned the electorate and, further, you have abandoned the citizenry. There is no worse crime committed in office.

The Democrats need to stop talking about Bush... and look to themselves.

Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking in support of striking AFSCME sanitation workers
at Mason Temple, Memphis, April 3, 1968