I don’t know how much you read Daily Kos, but Markos has been calling for his ranks to ‘leave everything on the road’ in an effort to win every last available seat in Congress. The Arizona Republic characterizes his attitude as having the “unseemly scent of wild-eyed vengeance.” Markos has raised over two million dollars for House and Senate races.
I have been quietly uncomfortable with Markos’ tone as he asks for total decimation of the Republican caucus. I haven’t said anything because I agree with him, totally. What the Arizona Republic, and other conservatives, need to understand is that the hunger for justice can easily bleed into a hunger for revenge. And Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and Santorum have left Washington DC as one giant crime scene which, come January 20th, should be literally festooned with yellow police tape. But it won’t be.
There is too much complicity on the Democratic side. There are too many denizens of the Village that value forgiveness (in the name of nonpartisanship) over the law and the Constitution. Barack Obama has too many big problems to tackle to get sidetracked with a truth and reconciliation project. Bush and Cheney should have been impeached. They weren’t, and they almost definitely will not be. That means that our only real source of justice is at the ballot box on Tuesday. Election Day is the day when the American people can pass their verdict on the crimes, corruption, and incompetence of the Bush administration and of conservatism in general. Either the people send a loud and resounding message, or we’ll never truly let the world know that we understand what we let happen to our country on our watch and that we condemn it.
Most people have spent the last four years working hard trying to feed their families, save for college, make a little extra for retirement, and enjoy the little things in life. Others of us have spent the last four years, every single day, documenting the atrocities of the Bush/Cheney administration and the Frist/DeLay Congress, and screaming ‘No, No, No, that is illegal, that is immoral, that is a LIE.’ We know the crime scene better than anyone, and we thirst for justice. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. That is the universal underlying faith of the blogosphere and the activist left. We know the crimes, but we also know the shortcomings of the bipartisan consensus in Washington. We know they are incapable of giving us the full measure of justice.
To be sure, the commentariat of the Beltway no longer argues with us. They have conceded that we were right all along. There were no WMD. The war in Iraq was a costly lie and a moral monstrosity. Guantanamo was wrong. Torture is wrong. We were being spied on. The Republicans are incompetent and corrupt. And Bush is the worst president ever. We have won the argument, but we will still be denied justice. And because we know we won’t get justice, our only outlet is to defeat those the Establishment won’t convict.
They should hope as many Republicans lose as possible. Perhaps then, our thirst will be sated.