Surveying the wreckage, Hesiod Theogeny exults:

WE'RE FREE!!!!

No more ass kissing the Bush Administration. No more rubberstamping.

We can fight the good fight, and for Democratic Party principles, without worrying whether we'll piss off a bunch of Bubba's South of the Mason-Dixon line.

We can be Democrats again.

Of course, the Democrats in Congress had the same freedom when they were voting on Dubya's tax cut, confronted by the Dubya's rollbacks of health and safety standards, and asked to endorse his maniacal drive towards war on Iraq. They chose not to use it. And the result was predicted by Harry Truman in 1952:

When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.

In the meantime, there's one last irony in this: the response of the Greens to anyone who worried that a vote for a Green candidate was wasted in a two-party system, was, in effect, that withholding votes from the current crop of Democrats was the only way to get any real progressivism back into national politics, and putting a few Republicans in power in the meantime would be an acceptable price to pay. It's starting to look like they were right about the first part. We'll just have to see about the second.