Will a Progressive Posse Ride in the Senate?

If there is a spark of life left in liberalism in these United States, the last, best hope for rekindling it lies in the newly elected Senate.

There, one can pray, women like Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren might rally around Bernie Sanders to form a Progressive Posse, perhaps attracting New Mexico's new Senator Martin Heinrich and a few other lefties to come out of the closet and grow some cojones.

Such a posse could have a profound effect on policy.  But it would have to coalesce fast or all will be lost and Dr. Kidglove's second term will be a worse disaster than his first.

John Boehner's Teapot House will be as delusional in its next incarnation as it has been for the last two years.  Sanity, if any, in the legislative branch has to come from the Senate.

A Progressive Posse's first order of business should be to send a message to President Obama that if he nominates Erskine Bowles to succeed Timmy Titmouse Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, they will lead the fight against his confirmation.  Bowles's name is floating all over Washington as the likely nominees for Geithner's post.  Bowles, a sleazy tool of the corporatocracy, has called Paul Ryan's Disneyworld Fantasy budget plan "serious and sensible."

Just as Geithner's own nomination signaled what a farce of surrender Obama's first term would be, so the Bowles nomination, if it happens, would signal the magnitude of the disaster Term Two would become.

Someone needs as well to stiffen the President's spine to stand pat on the brink of the so-called financial cliff until Boehner and his cockeyed cronies come to grips with reality and accept a permanent extension of the Bush middle-class tax cuts, along with an agreement in principle on increasing taxes for the very rich.  Warren and Baldwin, a budget stalwart in the House, are ideal candidates to lead the spine-stiffening campaign.

The Progressive Posse could also submit its own list of proposed nominees to succeed Lady Macbeth as Secretary of State.  Obama would make a long overdue down payment on his undeserved Nobel Peace Prize if he nominated someone for Foggy Bottom who has less blood on his or her hands than Hillary.  Inasmuch as Bibi Netanyahu was Mitt Romney's offstage campaign manager, Dr. Kidglove really doesn't have to cater to the Israeli leader's whims this time around.  What's wrong with having a Secretary of State who might spend a few minutes in cabinet meetings suggesting peace alternatives?

A country without an effective left cannot be a democracy.  The democratic republic we called the United States of America  died along with the victims of the planes that crashed into those twin towers eleven years ago, because liberalism went up in the smoke.

Chris Hedges, the brilliant journalist and social critic, says the American left cannot be revived.  Part of me fears that he is right.   Another part hopes that somehow there will arise in the Senate the seed  of rebirth.

"I didn't run for the Senate to make history," said the openly lesbian Ms. Baldwin, "I ran to make change."

You go, girl!