Dear Senator Clinton,

Many of us here in your own adopted State of New York begged you for a conversation last year.

Again and again, we requested that you engage Jonathan Tasini in a debate over the issues that are so important, especially the single issue that swept your party into power in both Houses of Congress.

No one should stand for public office unless she is willing to stand on her positions.

No election is morally honest without an honest and open debate.

Only a few months ago, you denied us this conversation and obscured your thoughts and actions on matters of great concern to many of us.

Now, that your apparatus is set in place and you are confident that you can control this “conversation” you are ready to rap. Yes, we remember your Statewide “Listening Tour” six years ago.

Your Party did not win last November’s election. Rather, the Republicans lost.

Yet, in 2000 and 2004, they gained enough votes to fudge the last two Presidential elections because they energized their base.

That base imploded as they gradually came to realize that Jesus of Nazareth was more concerned about hypocrisy than He was about the conjectured sexuality of cartoon characters.

At least, the Bushling had a base before it imploded.

Madam Senator, your Party’s base imploded before you ever uploaded your internet “announcement”.

We who gave up our weekends and took days off from our jobs to travel and stay overnight in different “swing” States at our own expense to campaign in 2004 against this disaster in the White House are the BASE.

We brought new voters to the polls, signing up new registrants at doorsteps, parking lots, street corners and barrooms. We attend teach-ins. We write letters. We set up blogs. We march in the streets. We ask questions. We show up for public meetings and get ejected from them. We make phone calls. We read proposed legislation and have re-read the Constitution through countless times. We write songs. We paint placards. We pray. We fast. We harangue our clergy. We block traffic. We write checks. We distribute flyers and books. We hope to “study war no more”, yet have educated ourselves about it to a remarkable degree. We participate in fundraisers. We were spat upon and threatened. We were called “moonbats”, “hippies”, “traitors”, “terrorists”, “loons” and “pinheads”. We work. We give. And we know and we vote.

I hope that any strategist in your Party, and still, mine, who thinks that you are a viable candidate, will open the real conversation that you denied us last year.

I voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore in 2000. I live in a deeply “Blue” State and it was “safe” for me to do so.

It’s a safe bet that Nader’s impact on that election will slip into obscurity when the Democratic leadership instructs thinking Americans to vote for a warmongering Senator who sat on the board of Walmart.

The sudden hemorrhage of voter support for the Democratic Party will be unprecedented!

If given the opportunity to choose between “Hillary Clinton” and “Al Gore” in a Democratic Primary, I will be at the election site at the crack of dawn, as usual, and vote for the latter.

I cannot believe that I am alone.

And still, we can do much better!

gaelicstarover.blogspot.com/2007/01/conversation-little-late-isnt-it.html

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