There have been so many ways in which the Democratic Party "leadership" has betrayed the party's values in addition to supporting the war and pushing through the nominations of Mukasey and other dangerous right-wing extremists.

ENDA
I have blogged extensively on how the Democratic Party "leadership' has sabotaged ENDA by excluding gender identity and through other efforts to water the legislation down. In a year where ENDA faces certain veto, the party power brokers have diluted ENDA so that any bill that will reach a Democratic president in the future will be either incredibly weak or completely worthless.

Barney Frank and Tammy Baldwin, acting on behalf of Nancy Pelosi and other heterosexist bigots in the party, have ignored the views of the queer community on what kind of civil rights bill we want. Heterosexual liberals who are vaguely sympathetic to lgbt issues may be fooled by this phony show of support by the Democratic Party insiders, but queers are not. Liberal queers know what was done to us and will remember it in 2008.

Katrina
It is a sad day when liberal Democrats need to lobby Democratic Party bigwigs to actually take action to deal with the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. From Progressive Democrats of America:

Push the Senate Today to Support Katrina Survivors
September 25th, 2007

100,000 displaced. 65,000 families still living in FEMA trailers. This is the Gulf Coast two years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. After years spent dragging its feet, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs is holding hearings today on the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, the bill that will create a real road home for thousands of renters and owners in New Orleans and throughout the region.

The Gulf Coast Civil Works Project, an even more comprehensive approach to helping people still being screwed over years after Katrina and Rita still languishes in the House with a leadership more interested in supporting Katrina profiteers than Katrina victims.

Trade
House and Senate Democratic ringleaders have been pushing through more corporate trade deals that hurt wages and jobs in the US while promoting abject poverty abroad. How are they going to get union members to turn out and vote Democrat in 2008 when the party is doing everything to destroy their standards of living?

Impeachment
How can anyone talk about the betrayal of liberal Democrats and constitutional responsibilities without mentioning impeachment?

Bush and Cheney don't just have bad policies, they have committed serious crimes including but not limited to:

- Illegally occupying their offices due to stolen elections.
- Fraud in order to get us into the Iraq War.
- Perpetrating a war of aggression and genocide in Iraq, crimes against humanity which carry life imprisonment as penalties
- Torture
- Illegal wiretapping and email monitoring
- Ordering federal employees to engage in campaign activities, while on the clock.
- Blocking and obstructing criminal investigations of themselves and other administration figures.

Every member of Congress, regardless of party, has a constitutional obligation to impeach Cheney and Bush. Yet, Nancy Pelosi and other DINO's have violated their oaths of office by keeping impeachment "off the table."

Impeachment is one of the most important issues to liberal Democrats and to many conservatives and moderates who place the rule of law above ideology. Yet, power brokers in the Democratic Party treat those views with utter contempt.

How Out of Touch Can the Party Apparatus Get?
If you look at the tone of fundraising appeals from the DCCC and DNC, you would think everything is just fine between the power brokers and liberals in the party. It is as if Howard Dean and other Washington insiders have lost complete contact with the party's base. They only seem to talk to the pundits and corporate interests who write the biggest checks.

You can see what party liberals think by looking at Democrats.com's call for a donor strike.

Impact on 2008
Obviously, Democratic candidates face major obstacles to getting liberal support in November 2008. The Democratic Party is in an amazingly weak position during an election where the party should be poised to pick up the presidency and win a few Senate seats.

However, the GOP has enormous problems too. The military defeat in Iraq is helping to divide the party even though they won't admit publicly that Bush has lost the war. The rapture that never came is weakening the resolve and unity of the Christian Taliban, just as the sexual behavior of many Republicans fails to conform to the puritanical idiocy of Christian extremists. GOP economic policies are kicking many out of the middle class while making the lower middle class and poor whites who used to faithfully vote Republican even worse off.

The Republicans face the opposite problem than the Democrats. The GOP's fanatical pursuit of far right policies has left them incredibly vulnerable as those policies are failing miserably for the vast majority of Americans and the country as an entity. The Democrats are in serious trouble because they have shown contempt for liberal positions and policies that can save our country.

The two major parties in this country are at their weakest point since the time of the disintegration of the Whigs in the middle 18th Century.