This Daily Kos diary is interesting, in how its author channels his/her frustration over the Iraq funding vote through both a very important insight and a completely useless cliche.

The cliche is that "we are, indeed, a one-party state in this country." It's a lazy sentiment driven by a cranky defeatism, and it demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to analyze, with competence, American politics as they actually function. The United States, for various reasons, has almost always had two large coalition parties, each vying against the other for overlapping constituencies, but each also veering out in various directions, sometimes with great thrust and surprising radicalism, and each party also contradicting itself with regularity. If anything, the American parties have in recent years arguably become more disciplined, more "party-like" in the European sense than ever before. In fact, that development is closely related to the current crisis.

The insight in theyrereal's diary is contained in this observation:

Who do the Democrats fear?

Do they fear us? Obviously no. Not one stinking bit.

Do they fear the American people in general? Same answer, only with laughter.

The diarist veers in the wrong direction with the next sentence, arguing that what the Democrats fear is something called "The Corporatocracy Gang of Which George Bush is the official Figurehead." Not that "coporatocracy" and "gang" are necessarily bad ways to describe the Bush administration. But the analysis is headed into the weeds. Let's bring it back on track.