For us liberals and progressives Obama was our last, best hope.  He's proved he wasn't, and now, the Democratic Party is dead to us.

Question: What do we do?  Answer: Move to the Republican Party -- and take it over.

The Republican Party has a long history of supporting freedom stretching back to Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.  As late as the 1960s the vast majority of Republican legislators voted for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.  One hundred years ago it was the home of trust busters, pacifists, and progressives.  It can be again.

And it's ripe for a take-over.

Since the 1960s changes in the nominating processes of both political parties have made the power of small groups of single-issue primary voters determinative.  The most energized group in the Republican Party has been the crazy fundies; in most districts every Republican candidate must pull his forelock in their direction.  But suppose the left-liberals currently residing in the Democratic Party's basement joined the few old-style Republicans to retake that party.

I know; liberals and progressives will say what you're suggesting means we'd be abandoning the poor, the working poor, the unions -- abandoning our long-standing romance with the dead and gone New Deal -- and selling our souls to the corporations.  Not so.  Main Street Republicans are not Wall Street and Wal-Mart Republicans.  Most of them have no more love for a corporate-bought Congress than we do.  The most they want is smaller government -- and reminding ourselves of the wars, destruction of civil rights, and corporate socialism big government has brought us, we should to.

Ladies and Gentlemen.  Within the Democratic Party we liberals are nothing but powerless supplicants .  We either continue in our humiliation or we leave.  I say it's time to depart.

N.B.  The writer has been a Yellow Dog Democrat for -- well, forever.  No longer!