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Surely you’ve realized by now that I’m angry at the Republican party generally: its candidates, its rank-and-file, its machine, and above all its leadership, the criminals sitting in office or happily awaiting proactive pardons for all they’ve done for the Bush administration. Honestly, though, there’s plenty of blame to go around. They wouldn’t be in office, or abusing office as they are, without plenty of help—from compliant news services (if not entirely co-opted by right-wing billionaires like Zell and Murdoch), from apathetic voters who aren’t furious about current events and never bothered to do their homework before voting in the first place, and from Democrats who have either decided to yield without a fight or simply adopted conservative platforms wholesale as the new center.

It’s this last that’s got me most angry at the moment. When an angry public swept them into a majority of both Congressional houses in 1986, despite loaded dice and gerrymandered districts, that should have been a great, big fucking sign that we’ve had enough of the neocons, and that we wanted the Dems to stand up and drive those police state, war-mongering, treasury-stealing, spying, torturing, you-negroes-in-Louisiana-don’t-count motherfuckers out. Two years later, Americans still waiting for someone to push back, Barack Obama rose from the back benches to topple heir-apparent Hillary Clinton fueled almost entirely by the hope that he would succeed where Congress had failed.

Want to know what the issues are? Want to know what’s really on the voters’ minds, what they want from a candidate, what will make them stand up and vote in droves? You already know. So does Barack Obama. So does Harry Reid. So does Nancy Pelosi. But just to make sure, Pelosi has, for several weeks now, been sponsoring a Digg-style “Netroots Nation” questionnaire at askthespeaker.org, where people can raise issues. They can also bump the issues others have raised upwards or downwards in significance with a quick up-or-down vote. Guess what’s at the top of the list. Go on, guess.

Tough call? I know. There’s so much to choose from. We’re still hemorrhaging troops and money in Iraq. The housing crisis is hitting everyone, with serious fears of a general banking melt-down hurting markets worldwide. The planet is dying and Bush doesn’t feel we can afford to save it. Business is shrinking nonetheless, and paychecks with it, a shrinkage magnified by the biggest. Fucking. Debt. Ever. A debt accrued fighting an unjust war while restructuring taxes so the wealthy won’t have to pay them any more. These are huge problems, to be sure. But they don’t even make the top five.

The big issues are all matters of the rule of law. Why is Congress simply letting Karl Rove get away with ignoring a Congressional subpoena? Why is Congress even thinking about telecom immunity for aiding illegal seizure of private phone records? Presidential impeachment. Launching investigations of the current presidency once a new man is in office. Truth and reconciliation boards to deal with years of presidentially-approved torture.

People are angry. Not as angry as I, perhaps, but angry nonetheless. They know they’ve been sold up the river by a lying, cheating, spying, torturing presidency; even the crazy 27%, the jingoistic mouth-breathers and the religious zealots have begun to admit that, okay, maybe the past eight years haven’t been the kind of government they thought they were voting for (a base lie). And, at long, long last, the general public wants some accountability.

In this environment, playing to the center is precisely the wrong move. This is not a time for polite attempts to find a new center. This is a time to grab hold of that anger and turn it into a mighty electoral weapon. This is one of those rare moments when negative campaigning is not only a viable strategy, but morally justifiable—nay, desirable.

Yet the Democrats persist in trying to appear moderate, even as the Republicans continue to redefine “moderate” as something just shy of fascism. We can’t win by compromising with the Republican right; they’ve either forgotten how or never intended to in the first place. They’ve won every major fight for a generation by refusing to compromise, starting with the blessed Saint Ronnie, moving through Newt Gingrich, and right up into Dick “fuck you” Cheney and Scalia’s “originalist” belief that the founding fathers would approve of warrantless surveillance.

Obama screwed up by supporting the new FISA bill granting telecomm immunity and embracing as law the warrantless wiretaps once considered scandalous; his popularity and his campaign donations both dipped sharply after the FISA vote. Pelosi screwed up by announcing impeachment off the table, even as Bush persists in keeping war with Iran on the table. Congress screwed up by giving John Yoo and David Addington a pass in their contempt-filled testimony; it was more important that each congressman get his forty-five seconds to wag a finger than actually to hold them to answer questions. What is the matter with these people? Are they so whipped by the aura of failure that they’ve stopped trying? Are they individually so wrapped up in the corruption of the current regime that they don’t dare air out the laundry? Are the progressives simply gone—along with decent Republicans shoved aside by the neocons—replaced by “Democrats” like the DLC, who believe the country should be divided between the authoritarian rich who hate gays and love Jesus and the authoritarian rich who think gays are okay? The only way—the only way—to lose this election is to stir apathy, to play into the belief (nurtured for a generation by the right wing) that there’s not all that much difference between the parties, no reason to choose beyond a chest-thumping tribalistic devotion.

Stop it! Just…stop it! This country has drifted so far towards the right that it’s forgotten what the center looks like. Another decade of this one-sided approach to moderation, and it will forget what the Bill of Rights looks like. Just as its current leader, George W. “just a goddam piece of paper” Bush has.