We’re a little more than a day away from the true beginning of the Democratic Primary Season. Every candidate is marshalling his forces for the attack. They will march at dawn. Frankly anyone who says now that they know how the events of the next few days will unfold is a liar. Everyone has plans for battle, but no such plan survives the first contact with the enemy.

The campaign season to date has led me to two unshakeable conclusions. First, the Democrat Party is a thoroughly diseased and debased institution, one which cannot even command the loyalty of most of its own supposed members. The only thing holding it together today is hatred of President Bush and, quite frankly, even that isn’t working very well. The Democrats are torn asunder by two factions: a ‘moderate’, DLC, faction which is mostly fond of America and another Copperhead faction which actively hates America. More on this later.

The second conclusion I have come to is this: Dr. Howard Brush Dean III, the Mayor of Vermont, is totally unfit to be the President of the United States. Forget politics for a second. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with me knows that I hate Howard Dean and would like nothing more than to see him win the nomination in a bruising fight and then lose to President Bush in a McGovernesque landslide come November. But the health of the Republic is something that, for me at least, transcends politics.

Dr. Dean is, by his own account, mentally unfit to occupy the supreme executive office in the land. This must be of the utmost concern to anyone concerned with the nation. In an interview with People Magazine, Dean admitted that, upon hearing the news that the Governor of Vermont had died and that he was now Governor, he began hyperventilating and suffered an anxiety attack.

According to anxities.com, a web site which caters to people with anxiety disorders, a panic attack’s symptoms can include, “increased heart rate, dizziness or lightheadedness, shortness of breath, inability to concentrate, and confusion.” Moreover, by many accounts, people who have panic attacks are prone to suffer recurrences of such attacks.

Dean says that the attack occurred because, “To suddenly get told that you have responsibility for 600,000 people — it provokes a little anxiety.” Think about that for a second. If this man had an anxiety attack on being told that he had responsibility for 600,000 people, then how on Earth is he ever going to be response for three hundred million people?

Think about it folks. Put that good of your country above faction. We live in a dangerous world. ICBM’s can reach this country from another in just a few short minutes. What happens on the day when missiles are flying, the Secret Service is rushing the President onto the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and the Secretary of Defense says, “Mr. President, the first nukes will land on American soil in fifteen minutes”? What happens if the President suffers from hyperventilation and confusion then?

Go back to 9-11. Remember the moment when, in that Florida classroom, Andy Card stepped up to President Bush and told him that a second plane had hit the second tower, that America was under attack. How would the world have reacted had President Bush responded to that news by going into convulsions?

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, Harry Truman was hastily called to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt gave him the news. Think about that. In the middle of a global war, the most terrible war in the entire history of the world, Harry S. Truman of Missouri is called in and informed that he is now the most powerful man in the world. How did he respond? By taking command, and taking charge. We don’t demand perfection of our leaders, but we must demand that they not respond to a crisis by passing into an incoherent state.

Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t like the rest of the Democrats running for President either, in fact, I hate them. But that doesn’t mean that I’m so crazy that I would prefer to give that man even a chance at the White House simply to keep, say, John Kerry, out of it. Forget policy differences for the moment. After all, even if the worst-case scenario were to come to pass, there’d still be enough Republicans in Congress to keep even say, Al Sharpton from doing something totally insane. We’re talking about a man who is simply unfit to be President due to his temperament and psychological state.

When I read about Dean’s “you sit down” outburst in Iowa last week (where he yelled at a man to sit down, after he asked a hostile question) I didn’t think much of it. I’ve been at enough political meetings to know that there are often questioners who are out to make themselves the focus of the meeting. But then I saw the video of the incident. It wasn’t a playful comment, or even a merely firm one: it was one born of fury.

I ran for School Board once and had to sit though about twenty Town Hall meetings. I’ve been through a half-dozen or so other campaigns, and I’ve never seen a politician: even some sixth-rate amateur running for City Council is some seventh-rate town, really explode the way Dean did in response to such a relatively innocuous question. Dean wasn’t politicking there: he was really angry and just couldn’t control himself.

Altogether, what I’ve observed of Dean over the months suggests to me that he isn’t ready for prime time. After all, there are about thirty Mayors in the United States who are in charge of more people than Dean was as Governor of Vermont. The last Mayor to seek to make a serious run for the Presidency was John Lindsay in 1972, and he was at least the Mayor of New York City. In fact, I would argue that even Dennis Kucinich had a far more difficult job as the Mayor of Cleveland than Dean had as Governor of Vermont.

If the Democratic Party is to have any hope of survival, it needs to take this chance to purge the modern Copperheads from its ranks. They are a cancer eating away at flesh of a once-proud institution. While this contagion takes many forms, the largest body of them is the Dean faction (though more and more of them seem to now be spreading to other campaigns as even some of the rats begin to wise up and flee the S.S. Dean). Howard Dean did not create these people. In fact, in a very real sense, they created Howard Dean.

The rise of the Mayor of Vermont is not due to the fact that he has any spectacular appeal, it’s due to the fact that the MoveOn.org crowd had to have someone run for President on their behalf, and Dennis Kucinich, what with the bankrupting of Cleveland, the ‘Department of Peace’, his Vegan diet, and all the rest of it was just a little to wacky for them. So the turned to the little-known former Governor of Vermont who, lacking the handicap of having served in Congress, seemed easy to reshape and refashion. Plus, of course, there was the gay unions thing as well. A little-discussed fact is the high percentage of activist liberals who are homosexuals. This, I am certain, was a major factor in the crowning of Dean.

Deep down the MoveOn types are filled with a deep loathing for America and Americans. They hate Christianity and they hate the flag. If you talk to them one-on-one over a few drinks, they’re usually honest enough to admit to you that they think America “got what it deserved” on 9-11 or that, alternately, the Bush Administration was somehow complicit in the attacks. One of the greatest dangers of internet politics is the mainstreaming of conspiracy-theorizing, previously limited to the lunatic fringe. A visit to mainstream Democratic web sites today will find countless people ready to swear to the existence of the sort of vast covert plots which were once the near-exclusive domain of Lyndon Larouche and the John Birch Society. This is true on the right as well (or at least was true during the Clinton years) but it was never quite so widespread. After all, no Republican Presidential candidate every suggested that the “Clinton Death List” was an “interesting theory.”

Ann Coulter is fond of saying that, if the American people knew what liberals really believe, they would want to boil them in oil. That’s closer to the truth than what most of the far-left these days believes which is, namely, that if the American people knew what liberals believed they would respond by launching a revolution and declaring America a people’s state.

Because the far-left is convinced that their beliefs are not only correct, but potentially popular as well, they therefore have come to the conclusion that they thing keeping them down is a conspiracy so vast that is dwarfs the one depicted in the X-Files. They think that the George W. Bush (who is simultaneously dumber than a Chimp and the evil leader of a world-wide cabal) is assassinating political opponents (notably Mel Carnahan and Paul Wellstone) staged the 9-11 attacks, and it behind all sorts of other miscellaneous acts of evil (such as triggering the recent Earthquake in Iran). Because these people are the ones with the energy, they are controlling the Democratic campaign.

If given the chance these people will cripple American power and sign the world over to the Chinese. They will end the War on Terror and, in so doing, doom millions of Americans to die in future terrorist attacks and consign hundreds of millions of others to a life of abuse and servitude under increasingly-powerful Islamist regimes. They will assist in the renewed rise of communism in South America and inflict countless other evils upon the human race. I believe that all of this will happen if, by some chance, Howard Dean is allowed to become President because, having secured his election by the support of such people, he will find it impossible to shake free of their grasp.

In the Civil War, Copperheads were not necessarily in favor of the South or slavery, they just weren’t in favor of doing anything about them (or to save the Union either). These new Copperheads have no love of Islamists (except so far as they hurt their enemies, Americans and Jews), but they aren’t interested in doing much about them either. I do not suggest that a Dean Administration would bring about the disasters outlined above by action, but by inaction.

Now if the time for loyal Democrats, those people who, in the words of Joe McCarthy, are “without a party” to take back what is rightfully theirs. A Democratic Party that once more becomes the party of Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and, hell, even Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson, is not one that I would vote for but, at the least, one I would respect.

Think about all of this, as the days roll inexorably forward. America needs a two-party system to be strong. One party government is, inevitably, corrupt and corrupting. But, given the choice between corruption and treason I, and many others, will choose the former.

Mark my words; it will happen one way or another. Either the present-day Democratic Party will revive in a new, patriotic, form or it will die and, eventually, the Republicans will faction- in all probability along conservative-moderate lines. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.