The adulation of Reagan would not exist if he had faced the impeachment his actions demanded.

Bush Jr would never have been in the running at all if Bush Sr. had been prosecuted.

Those failures alone didn't bring us here. The leadership had another chance to fight for us -- to fight for our right to have our votes counted -- by standing and objecting to the unlawfully appointed Florida electors.

And, even failing that, they had yet another chance to turn the tide by drawing a line in the sand and fighting to impeach Bush to defend perhaps the most basic human right there is -- the right not to be tortured.

When the leadership went all out to stop the momentum that was building for impeachment, the message they sent was crystal clear: "This is not important enough to us. Torturing in the name of the American people isn't really so bad." And that message gave power to the worst of humanity. Their failure to draw lines in the sand at critical junctures allowed lines that should be held inviolable to be crossed with impunity.

How these failures paved the road to our current fate is self-evident.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, this is NOT about "bashing" them. This is not just about "the past." It is about THE FUTURE. All I am attempting to do is encourage a recognition of how wrong and destructive the rationalizations for inaction have been. I think it is vital to expose how counter-productive "can't win, so don't fight" is; to point out the extent to which fear of 'backlash' blinds them to the benefits of demonstrating the courage of their convictions; to put up a mirror to help them see how absurd notions like "I opposed Alito by casting a losing No vote on the floor (even though I refused to join the filibuster that would have actually stopped him)" are. If we can put a "stake in the heart" of the rationalizations that keep them from fighting the good fights, we will either see a whole lot more movement in the right direction TODAY and TOMORROW, or a new set of irrational rationalizations for inaction will crop up (and need to be torn down).