I come from a very Republican, borderline wingnutty family. The process of how I became a progressive Democrat was complex and drawn-out, but let's just say that I was the lone member of my family who noticed the extreme disconnect between Ronald Reagan's rhetoric and Ronald Reagan's actions, and this awareness helped eventually shine a bright light on the sheer overall moral and political bankruptcy of conservatism. The last straw for me was seeing a disgusting creep like Oliver North become a national hero to conservatives -- that was, essentially, my no-turning-back moment. I knew then I had NOTHING in common with the right-wing crowd.
As we've seen over the last couple of months or so -- and especially over the last couple of weeks -- the national Democratic Party appears to have become little more than a shell of an organization with little or no sense of purpose, floundering about for a reason to justify its existence. I don't need to document the long list of inaction and tentativeness foisted upon us Americans by what passes for the party "leadership" -- but suffice it to say that when they punted on the virtually risk-free issue of congressional subpoenas to possible perjurers, it became crystal-clear that the Democratic Party, as currently construed, serves about the same function in Congress that the professional seat-fillers serve at the Academy Awards every spring. We are being "represented" by crash-test dummies, it seems.
