Just as the prediction that pollsters would face Judgment Day after Election Day was proved dead wrong, so too was the expectation that gridlock would ensue. Not even the month-long struggle to count every vote had any effect on Bush. What happened?

Third parties would point to their insistence that there is no substantial difference between the two main parties. This does not stand up to the test, however. Ralph Nader, outspoken in his opposition to both major parties, asked to testify against John Ashcroft, the likes of whom cannot be found among Democrats. No one would have been surprised at the speed Bush put his radical, right-wing agenda into effect. And Democrats would have already done substantively the same things in the years they were in power - had there been no substantive difference.

The real problem is that Democrats are too nice. It is generally agreed that they’re the soft-hearted side. Even when they have serious misgivings about Republican administrations, of which there have been plenty, they have not resorted to shutting down the Government, or waging filibusters. They believe in the fallacy spread by the corporate media that partisanship should be left at the Capitol's door.

They are wrong. When Bush scrapped regulations to reduce arsenic in drinking water, he declared war on the health of the people he should represent. It is no act of compassion. It is a stupid capitulation to industry, an act of folly, and they should have decried it as such. When he scrapped support for renewable energy while pointing to the nation’s energy crisis as an excuse to destroy Alaska’s pristine land and sea, he declared war on the millions of animals that call the area home. Yes, these are partisan issues, because one party is standing for polluters and the other for the environment. Well over fifty million Americans, the second most ever, voted for Al Gore. They wanted reason, not pollution. When the leader, well, an appointed leader, of a nation tramples on the rights of its citizens, someone must speak out. The media says people are sick of the Congress of the past few years. They’re sick, though, because of the direction the GOP led us: impeachment over nothing. It is time Democrats speak up, like they once did. They are half the Senate, after all.