100 monkeys typing.

50 Ways To Lose Your Lover

Silence denotes consent.

Yesterday, when Democrats in the Senate failed to act as a unit, they failed their constituents, their party and the nation as a whole. Their conscious decision to roll over rather than make a stand on principle will result in aftershocks. One of the more palpable ramifications may very well be a widespread loss of confidence and support from the base they've counted on for years.

Disappointment has turned to disgust, sadness to anger and acceptance to refusal. Excerpted below is a fragment of a much larger letter to the guilty Senators, reflecting these emotions. Read. Link. Share.

You knew Alito had boasted of his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a racist, sexist, homophobic, elitist alumni organization, when applying for a job in the Reagan administration. He claimed now not to know anything about the group or to have had any involvement with them, which offered only two possibilities, either of which was sufficient to instantly disqualify him--that he had lied to get the job then, or that he was lying to get the job now. You knew he had vigorously advocated a fight to reverse Roe v. Wade in his Reagan years, that the Supreme Court had explicitly rejected his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey where he argued in favor of requiring spousal notification--thus, in effect, giving men veto power over their wives' medical decisions and ownership of their uteruses. You knew of his failures to recuse himself from cases in which he had a financial conflict of interest. You saw his ruling allowing a warrantless strip search of a 10-year-old girl, just the most outrageous of many data points illustrating his contempt for individual rights. You knew of his support for the notion of an omnipotent "unitary executive" unconstrained by Supreme Court precedents, by the laws passed by Congress, even by the Constitution itself (that "goddamned piece of paper" as Bush calls it)--a grotesque concept utterly alien to American jurisprudence. You knew that most of his most important rulings were overturned by higher courts, that he usually dissented from the majority opinion in cases he heard, and was often the lone dissenter, indicating that his legal views were not mainstream and were often at odds with long-established precedents. Christ, he wouldn't even state that it was unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law stripping American-born children of illegal immigrants of their citizenship because he might have to rule on it in the future, in spite of the plain, unambiguous text of the Fourteenth Amendment.

(...)

In short, you've undermined everything the Democratic party supposedly stands for and crippled your ability to revive your moribund policy goals. The death rattle may not come this year, or next, or five years from now, but as long as Alito is on the Supreme Court, the bloodletting will continue until nothing remains of the Democratic agenda. And so-called Democrats like you are responsible. As Edmund Burke wrote, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And at the moment when decisive action was most desperately needed, YOU. DID. NOTHING.

This November, it's not enough to just vote for the removal of the corrupt GOP leadership. Replacement of the DO NOTHING Democrats should be equally as important. Apathetic complacency is not leadership.