This is who the spineless Democrats need to formulate a strategy for opening a lasting dialog with, people who see the naked emporer and want no part of applauding his nut sac flopping around in the breeze for all to see.

So when my mother called me the other day and told me she was considering registering as a Democrat, I was, well, stunned. Somewhere in a cemetery plot near Fillmore a body is spinning.

For the last year or more my mother has been gradually expressing ever greater exasperation with President Bush, the war, and the religious right. “Have you heard about this James Dobson guy?” she asked me on the phone, referring to the head of Focus on the Family. “If they overturn Roe vs. Wade, that’ll be it for me,” she said.

Then she mentioned Cindy Sheehan.

For all the efforts to discredit Ms. Sheehan, what she accomplished in drawing attention to the human cost of the war, if my mother’s opinion is any indication, crossed party lines. There’s a Mom Faction in American politics, and while it isn’t a monolithic Third Rail, it’s at least and second-and-a-half rail. When their children are dying on a battlefield of choice, you touch it at your peril.

My mother has her fingers on the pulse, and scalps, of many such women. She’s a hairdresser with a clientele that has been coming to her regularly for decades. Now grandmothers, these women were moms during Vietnam, in which over 50,000 American sons and daughters died. They worried then about their kids’ safety, now they’re worried about grandkids - theirs or someone else’s. Most are pretty mainstream, most Republican, and most, my mother tells me, pretty much fed up with George Bush.

One possible solution not open to America right now is drawing on other nations to provide support of any kind, even if it were only to offer their services as impartial, trusted brokers to all sides in the so-called "constitutional discussions" to perhaps get all sides to declare a moratorium on the killing while some earnest discussions begin.

Unfortunately, the unilateral cowboy-ism of Preznit All Hat No Cattle has driven many allies and potential allies from our side for the duration of the conflict and probably longer, it's going to be a generational task to rebuild our international street creds as having the moral authority to speak on much of anything in global realpolitik.

Is it time to begin a grassroots (netroots?) effort to earnestly take back the Democratic Party from the Joe Bidens, Joementums and Dianne Feinsteins? They have become Triangulating Losers who are intent on leading us off the cliff again to maintain their own status quo in the Senate (and House). Perhaps if we are going to preach a "slash and burn" approach to politics for retaking our Democracy from these bastards who are ruining our country, the place to start is at home.

After all, there are republican grandmothers out there who are waiting for a leader, and they'll join the fight too...