An Open Letter to Howard Dean
Governor Dean (soon to be Chairman Dean),
Amid the frenzied talk to taking back our Party, and taking back our country, yadda yadda, that we have engaged in during the past 2 years, I am writing to plead with you to save us from a great menace that goes unnoticed for 364 days a year: the Democratic response to a state of the union address. Jeez Louise! Could we have picked a more boring method, setting, deliverer, tone and message than we do year after year?? The President gets austere, he gets a distinguished audience obliged to show respect, he gets to imagine the most emotional possible characters in America today and bring them right to the hall!

I'm begging you with everything I've got, Governor (and hey there could even be a $25 DNC donation in it for you...). Save us from the humiliating, the pointless, the remote-control-killing (aaack! Pelosi's on every channel!), the brutal half hour that is the response to the State of the Union.

How? Big ideas, Howard, like you always promote. Next year, YOU deliver, or at least orchestrate, the response. In a big place. With a big enthusiastic audience. Of real people. Let's demonstrate real difference, not just try to hog the TV long enough to keep right-wing pundits from praising the President.

And while I'm at it. How about the response actually respond! We've got quick thinkers and decent technology, right? The SOTU speech is released right before it's given. We can surely work in direct references to his lies by the time the response is given, not generic rehearsed blah written days ago. Hell, show clips of Bush telling those lies (a la the Daily Show) on a big jumbotron to remind people of his worst moments before you bash them.

As it is, we're treated to 90 minutes of pomp + circumstance, lies and deceptions, all peppering fundamentally bad policy that's wrong for America....then right-wing pundits get on the talk shows (Chris Matthews had Republican speech-writers David From and Pat Buchanan, "balanced" by moderate, trying-to-sound-fair journalists Norah O'Donnell and Jon Meacham...WTF??) to praise the President's soaring language, high ideals and (well-rehearsed) confident delivery.

Next year, I say we give them something else, not that they have to consider, cursorily, but that they can't forget. I'm talking about kicking ass, taking names, and doing it in front of people who love it.