Gunfight at the OK Corral

It is an image that has been imbedded in my head for quite some while now....Donald Rumsfeld, George W., and Dick Cheney, all in jeans and casual shirts, striding down the lane at the Crawford ranch like so many gunslingers, toward waiting TV cameras. The occasion, as I recall, was to respond to an incessant call for peace from an upstart mom camped across the way whose son had been slain in a needless, devastating pissing contest engineered largely by these men.

My faith in the American people has been restored somewhat as of Tuesday. I was almost afraid to look at the results as they came in, fearing that once again, Americans were not going to deal with the obvious. But we did! As we travelled through out the U.S. in 2003 and again in 2005, I was dismayed at the insularity and what seemed to be a willfull refusal on the part of so many of my co-Americans to take a daring look at reality, creep out from behind a wall of fear that had been artificially constructed by the powerbrokers, and ask the hard questions of their government.

Tuesday's election said, finally, that we will no longer tolerate these gunslingers at reins of power in our nation. They are to get out of Dodge. "A little revolution is a healthy thing", said Sean Connery's character in "The Hunt for Red October". We've had a little revolution, a beautiful revolution, and our system of governance has come through for us.

I count myself as in Independent so my rejoicing is not that the Democrats per se now have a voice again. It is more that there will at last be another voice that the current administration is now forced to hear.

The ball is now in the Democrat's court. They will have to stop their whining and behave like mature adults. They say they realize that they were handed the Congress because the people are so, so sick of opaque dishonest governance, so, so sick of the rule of the moneyed elite who care not one whit for the health of the middle class, let alone the impoverished in our land of the free. Now, they will have to prove that they indeed take seriously the voice of the people. They should be terrified. Humble, open-handed reconciliatory governance is their only option.